How Westminster killed the political wife

One thing absent this election is something I never thought I would miss: the unusual lack of Political Wives (and the lesser-spotted Political Husbands) from the campaign trail.

Boris Johnson’s partner Carrie Symonds has made the odd, carefully choreographed appearance—but her sari-clad appearance at Neasden Temple this weekend was her first joint visit with her boyfriend in this campaign. Laura Alvarez has been accompanying Jeremy Corbyn around the country on some of his visits, and has featured in a few behind-the-scenes newspaper profiles, but has consistently refused to participate in the media circus of joint interviews or the One Show. Duncan Hames, himself a Liberal Democrat MP for the five years of the coalition government, has not been a notable feature of Jo Swinson’s campaign; nor have Nicola Sturgeon’s husband and, previously, Leanne Wood’s partner been centred in their respective efforts.

These final examples partly explain this phenomenon. In recent elections, the interest in political WAGs has been complicated by the presence of HABs; the oddness of wrangling wives for campaign pictures to bolster their husbands’ political ambitions is highlighted when there are women's husbands tagging along, too. Cherie Blair and Sarah Brown and Sam Cam could all gamely, dutifully smile for the camera; Denis Thatcher was never quite so convincing. (In fact, Margaret Thatcher, by staging photoshoots of herself doing the washing up, was in many ways her own political spouse, a housewife and Prime Minister all rolled into one.)

For as long as photographers have lurked outside family homes, wives have been expected to be malleable and to support their husbands in their political careers; to drop everything to present a smiling, approachable, united front. In an interview with ITV during the 2010 election campaign, Miriam Gonzalez Durantez, an international trade lawyer, said that she would help her husband, Nick Clegg, where she could, but could not simply drop her career to make herself available. This statement, of course, was interpreted as a swipe at Samantha Cameron by the Mail on Sunday.

The absence of partners and families in this year’s campaigns is not because politics has been enlightened. Men still get points for being married. In business, married men, especially ones with stay-at-home wives, are more likely to be high earners. In politics, too, wives continue to play an important symbolic role: they soften a Conservative who might otherwise seem uncaring, give a Labour man a hinterland beyond interminable political theory. Women in politics, meanwhile, cannot win: get married, drag your husband around the campaign trail and people will mutter darkly about who really wears the trousers, as they did with Australia’s Julia Gillard and her hairdresser partner. Stay single, and endure a lifetime of suggestive remarks about your possible sex life, or newspaper cartoons about your pathetic, virginal, harridan state, or faux-concerned remarks about your sad lack of children. (LGBT politicians, of course, have to dodge innuendo regardless of their personal choices.)

Children are, likewise, a boon for men in politics. Men in all walks of life get extra points for being care-givers: in academia, research shows that fathers’ careers benefit compared to their childless peers’, whilst mothers fall behind. There is no parental leave for MPs, although proxy voting is being rolled out, and Stella Creasy has recently become the first woman to hire a “locum MP” to cover her maternity leave. And while both fathers and mothers would benefit from more enlightened policies—and many male MPs find it tough to spend so much time away from their families, in Westminster—the lack of support and the demanding schedule make it especially hard for female MPs to cope with the early months of parenthood, when their physical presence is so often demanded. Harriet Harman and Diane Abbott are just two of the many MPs who have spoken about how hard they found juggling political careers with motherhood; about the need to work twice as hard so that they could not be accused of being distracted by their children.

All of the three main party leaders in this election are parents. Jo Swinson has two sons, her youngest still under two; Corbyn has three adult sons with his second wife; Boris Johnson has at least five children, although he famously declines to specify a precise number. In the 2016 Conservative party leadership contest, Andrea Leadsom had to step aside after heavily implying that Theresa May was less invested in Britain’s future because she does not have children. May received sympathetic press coverage for talking about her and Phillip’s inability to have children and their sadness about this (she was the first prime minister since Heath to be childfree).

But in this election, the children have been on the sidelines, not featured in a single memorable photocall, barely referred to in speeches. It is hard to identify precisely why this is: because the hard fight over Brexit overshadows the soft politics of the domestic? Because politics has hardened, become more violent and febrile, a place too rhetorically—or even physically—dangerous for children? Or because a speedy winter campaign, fighting bitterly over marginal gains, is not the time for leisurely double-page spreads at home with the family?

Or is it more about the candidates? After all, Swinson might feel that voters would respond poorly to a female prime ministerial candidate holding a toddler on her hip, despite Blair getting a pass when he had a new baby in Number 10; Johnson would struggle to summon goodwill from an electorate reminded forcibly of his philandering past.

It would be easy to argue that there is no place for families in politics. I don't drag my boyfriend to job interviews to say why he thinks I should get the job; it isn’t normal for careers to be evaluated based on photogenic children or supportive partners. Certainly, we need to make more space for different sorts of families to exist in political life, and there needs to be less frivolous, curtain-twitching scrutiny of people’s personal lives.

On the other hand, though: politics is not a job, but something of a vocation. We don’t vote based only on a candidate’s practical skills or professional attributes, but also how we feel about them as a person and what we believe to be their values. And our roles in domestic spaces are part of our politics: as second-wave feminists always maintained, the personal is political. The reason partners and children work on us as an electorate is because the people that we choose to make our lives with show something about who we are ourselves. There are always people whose brilliant spouses make us warm up to them, men whose feminist partners earn them a free pass even when they behave poorly, women whose sensible husbands undercut their image as flighty. Perhaps politics, like everything else, comes down to a simple truth: you are who you love.