Women in Labour: what's the problem?

The Labour Party has never had a female leader, unlike almost every other political party in the UK; are there historical, cultural or emotional reasons for this?

Margaret Thatcher’s election as leader of the Conservative Party in 1975 was in many ways remarkable, and her gender was not the least remarkable factor. The party was still heavily dominated by men, and it is surprising to remember than Thatcher was only the second woman ever to have sat in a Conservative cabinet when she was education and science secretary from 1970 to 1974; the trailblazer had been the cigarette-toting, schoolmistressy Scot Florence Horsbrugh, who had been Churchill’s minister of education (1951-54). Mervyn Pike, an able Yorkshirewoman, had spent a year in Heath’s shadow cabinet (1966-67): she was the “statutory woman”, replaced by Thatcher, of whom Heath said glumly “Willie Whitelaw agrees that she’s much the most able. But, he says, once she’s there we’ll never be able to get rid of her”. But Pike, although only 51, was not given a government role in 1970.

As late as March 1973, Thatcher had said on the BBC1 programme Val Meets The VIPs “I don’t think there will be a woman prime minister in my lifetime”. Within two years she led her party, and a little over six years later she was, indeed, prime minister, remaining in office for 11½ years. The Conservative Party has produced two more female prime ministers, Theresa May and Liz Truss, and a recent poll about the next Tory leader was led by three women: Kemi Badenoch, Penny Mordaunt and Suella Braverman. The most popular male candidate, home secretary James Cleverly, wasn;’t even in double figures.

Theresa May summed it up in her first appearance at Prime Minister’s Questions in July 2016. Jeremy Corbyn, in a way which summed up his approach to politics, used his first ever question to the new premier to ask about an inquiry into the violent clash between police and pickets from the National Union of Mineworkers in June 1984. May, still flushed with her uncontested accession to the leadership of the Conservative Party, batted him away.

In my years in the House, I have long heard the Labour party asking what the Conservative party does for women. Well—it just keeps making us Prime Minister.

It is not yet true that there are no entrenched barriers to women becoming successful in politics. There are still only 224 female Members of Parliament in a House of Commons of 650, just over a third, while the population is 50.6 per cent female, but that is rising rapidly: in 2010, it was only 143, while in 1979, when Thatcher became prime minister, there were a mere 19 female MPs. Deeper sociological and cultural attitudes still have an effect, as women tend to undertake the lion’s share of childcare and domestic tasks, but I honestly think—and I realise I say this as an unmarried, childless white man—that there are now few barriers to women being promoted within Parliament or awarded the most senior jobs (though we have yet to see a female chancellor of the Exchequer, the last major male bastion).

This is not to say there are no obstacles which women face to a much greater degree than men. There is clearly still a Westminster-wide problem of bullying, harassment, intimidation and inappropriately sexual behaviour (to put it mildly) which of course deters women from seeking careers in Parliament, from staying in jobs in Parliament and, no doubt, in some cases from progressing as far or as quickly as they might otherwise do.

The subject made me think: if female party leaders are still a relative novelty, their rarity value is rapidly diminishing. There have been three Conservative leaders, but women have also led the Liberal Democrats, the Scottish National Party, the Democratic Unionist Party, the Social Democratic and Labour Party, the Alliance Party of Northern Ireland, Plaid Cymru, the Green Party of England and Wales, the Scottish Greens, the UK Independence Party, the Brexit Party, Sinn Féin, the Wales Green Party, the Progressive Unionist Party, the Unionist Party of Northern Ireland, the Respect Party, the Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist), the Communist Party of Britain, the Scottish Socialist Party, Change UK, Veritas…

But not the Labour Party. One of the two major parties since 1922, when it overtook the Liberals (then divided between adherents of David Lloyd George and H.H. Asquith), and having first formed a government a century ago this month, Labour has three times had a woman as acting leader: Dame Margaret Beckett from May to July 1994, and Harriet Harman from May to September 2010 and May to September 2015. The party of the workers has more women MPs than any other, appointed the first and second women to be cabinet ministers, and provided the first female foreign secretary, home secretary, chief whip in the Commons and the Lords, leader of the House of Commons and speaker of the House of Commons.

Somehow, though, a woman has never emerged to take the Labour Party’s reins on a substantive basis. In truth, none has even come close. Since Beckett was the first in 1994, six women have offered themselves as candidates for the leadership (Diane Abbott in 2010, Yvette Cooper and Liz Kendall in 2015, Rebecca Long-Bailey and Lisa Nandy in 2020), and none has come anywhere close to victory. The current deputy leader is a woman, Angela Rayner, following in the footsteps of Beckett (1992-94) and Harman (2007-15), but there is a whiff of seeing the second place as quite far enough for women to rise. What is the problem?

(I will note here that the Scottish Labour Party has been led by women: Wendy Alexander 2007-08, Johann Lamont 2011-14 and Kezia Dugdale 2015-17, while Cathy Jamieson acted as leader ad interim 2001, 2007 and 2008. The Labour Party in Wales, now Welsh Labour, has not had a female leader.)

I should say that I am a firm believer that the way events shake out is dominated much more by chance and random factors than conspiracies, plots or systematic prejudice. It’s important to remember how many people, on the one hand, are tipped as “future party leaders” and how few, on the other hand, will ever rise to that level. Even with the recent flurry of changes, the Conservatives, for example, have only had 10 leaders in the past 59 years, and of those, Iain Duncan Smith (2001-03) and Michael Howard (2003-05) only served for two years, while Liz Truss, of course, was a 49-day wonder. So when someone is described as destined for the top job, we have to remember that the probability is they won’t achieve that goal.

The challenges and obstacles I talked about above might be a factor, but, of course, they apply to women in all parties. What I want to understand is whether there is something specific about, perhaps inherent in, the Labour Party. It is remarkable that virtually every other party, large or small, has at least briefly been led by a woman. The only other organisation of any significance of which I can think which has never been headed by a woman is the Ulster Unionist Party, though in the 2005 Parliament its only MP was Lady Hermon (North Down).

Recently I wrote (at some length) about the concept of big beasts in politics. It is difficult to argue that, for whatever reason, a phalanx of female Labour MPs has missed out on the leadership. Barbara Castle was a powerful figure in the Wilson government of 1964-70 but never had the broad base of support to be elected. Shirley Williams was touted as a high flyer: she was shadow home secretary from 1971 to 1973, and served in cabinet under Wilson and Callaghan as prices and consumer protection secretary (1974-76) and education secretary (1976-79). She was hugely intelligent and possessed of considerable charisma—she took a screen test for the role eventually played by Elizabeth Taylor in National Velvet—but she lost her seat at the 1979 general election, and, unhappy at the growing strength of the Left in the party, she joined three colleagues in January 1981 in forming the Council for Social Democracy, which two months later became the Social Democratic Party. So her time in Labour was over.

Were there other might-have-beens? The 1980s were male-dominated in the Labour Party, and the few women who made their way to the shadow cabinet were not likely candidates for the top job. Beckett and Harman aside, the other woman in Labour’s top team in the 1990s who possessed some of the characteristics of a leader was Mo Mowlam, MP for Redcar from 1987 to 2001, who served as Northern Ireland secretary 1997-99 and Cabinet Office minister 1999-2001; but she was diagnosed with a brain tumour even before Labour returned to office in 1997, and, having left the House of Commons, she died in 2005, aged only 55. She was intelligent and capable, with a doctorate in political science from the University of Iowa, and she had an unforced warmth and directness that appealed to voters. Her political abilities were considerable too: Neil Kinnock promoted her to the front bench only 10 months after she was elected, but later, covering City and corporate affairs in the trade and industry team, she found it difficult to work with the shadow secretary of state, Gordon Brown, which had longer term consequences. She volunteered to run Tony Blair’s leadership campaign in 1994, but Blair chosen Jack Straw as a safer pair of hands. Straw was rewarded with the home affairs brief and went on to hold senior cabinet roles continuously from 1997 to 2010.

The Labour landslide brought a record number of women MPs for Labour: 101, labelled, unfairly in some cases, “Blair babes”. (10 of them remain in the House of Commons as of January 2024.) The Blair/Brown government of 1997-2010 would see 18 women reach cabinet, although four—Jay, Amos, Ashton and Royall—were peers. We have looked at Beckett, Harman and Mowlam, and of the others, only really Yvette Cooper had anything like the stardust of a potential leader. Ruth Kelly, MP for Bolton West, rose swiftly, and was appointed to a cabinet role at 36, younger than any woman before or since, but, although Andrew Pierce in The Daily Telegraph called her “one of the cleverest and most ambitious members of the government”, she never developed a popular following. She stood down from the government in 2008 and the House of Commons in 2010.

Five women “attended” cabinet without ever reaching full cabinet rank under Blair and Brown: Beverley Hughes, Baroness Scotland of Asthal, Caroline Flint, Dawn Primarolo and Rosie Winterton. Flint had a degree of élan and personality, walking out of Gordon Brown’s government in 2009. In her resignation letter, she accused Brown of running a “two-tier government” and noted that “few [women] are allowed into your inner circle”. But, clearly angry, she said that women in his cabinet “have been treated by you as little more than female window dressing” and she could no longer tolerate being a minister “in a peripheral capacity”. There was a feeling that, having blown a whistle, Flint might also seek to progress towards the top of the party. She served in Ed Miliband’s shadow cabinet between 2010 and 2015, and stood in the contest for deputy leader when Miliband and Harman resigned, but she came in a fairly distant third, managing 23 per cent in the final round but lagging behind Stella Creasy, recently turned 38 and only an MP since 2010, and the eventual winner, Tom Watson.

The Corbyn era (2015-20) was sui generis in many ways. It was always likely that he would be replaced after an election defeat by someone from a different wing of the party or else, improbably, become prime minister, in which case all bets would be off. Plenty of women passed through his shadow cabinet, some extraordinarily fleetingly (Lyn Brown acted as shadow home secretary for 11 days while Diane Abbott was unwell), but few had the air of future leaders. Rebecca Long-Bailey and Lisa Nandy would run for the job in 2020 but Sir Keir Starmer won comfortably with 56 per cent of the vote.

Luciana Berger had a certain glossy briskness about her when she was elected for Liverpool Wavertree in 2010. She had not quite turned 29, but joined Ed Miliband’s front-bench team as shadow climate change minister five months later, moving to speak on public health from 2013 to 2015. Implausibly, she was part of Corbyn’s first shadow cabinet as shadow mental health minister, but was one of 21 members of the shadow cabinet to resign in June 2016 in an unsuccessful attempt to oust Corbyn. Berger felt she was being subjected to anti-Semitic abuse under the new leadership, and in February 2019 she left the Labour Party to join the Independent Group, later Change UK. By autumn she had moved to the Liberal Democrats, for a few weeks was their principal spokesman on health, well-being and social care, and stood for election in Finchley and Golders Green, but was defeated.

The lack of a female leader, or even very many plausible candidates, is all the more surprising as for many years the Labour Party employed the device of all-women shortlists for some constituencies to boost the number of women parliamentary candidates. The policy was introduced at the 1993 party conference, after the party found that its previous practice of requiring at least one woman on every shortlisted had not been effective, as few were selected in winnable seats. The conference had agreed in 1990 that it aimed to have 50-50 representation at Westminster by 2000; it came close to that target in 2017, with 45 per cent of its MPs being women, and finally succeeded in 2019, when 51 per cent of Labour MPs elected were women. The 1990 target was always unrealistic and ambitious, but delivering 19 years behind schedule even with the use of all-women shortlists is worthy of note.

The policy was controversial. Party leader John Smith did not refer to it directly in his speech at the 1993 conference, but included it as part of a broader set of reforms which included the abolition of the trades union block votes. Former leader Neil Kinnock and his deputy Roy Hattersley both condemned the idea, while David Pannick QC raised the idea that all-women shortlists might be illegal under the Sex Discrimination Act 1975, as it applied to “any person who confers an authorisation which is of assistance in gaining access to your profession or occupation”. In this position he was supported by Ann Carlton, co-convener of the pressure group Labour Supporters for Real Equality and married to former shadow defence secretary Denzil Davies, who dismissed them as “sexist and… counter-productive for the party electorally”.

Carlton’s experience may be illuminating. She was an experienced Labour Party operator: as well as being married to an MP and former shadow cabinet minister, she had been a special adviser to Anthony Crosland and John Silkin. Looking back at the controversy, she recalled the toxic atmosphere, the “sheer personal unpleasantness” in which arguments had been conducted. Speaking to Linda McDougall (herself married to Labour MP Austin Mitchell, Crosland’s successor in Great Grimsby) afterwards for the book Westminster Women, she complained:

The men who stood up and said, “We don’t approve,” were told that they were sexist. The women who spoke up were also browbeaten. There were all sorts of abusive things said to individuals.

Pannick was proved right. In 1995, Roger Dyas-Elliott took the Labour Party to an industrial tribunal because he had not been able to compete for a place on the shortlist for Keighley, while Peter Jepson sought redress in relation to Regent’s Park and Kensington North, and Brentford and Isleworth. Dyas-Elliott made his position quite clear:

It’s a question of principle. I am not anti-women and there is an easy answer to this problem: make it compulsory to have a shortlist with equal numbers of men and women so that constituencies can pass judgement according to their convictions and principles.

He and Jepson were supported by the Equal Opportunities Commission, and in January 1996, Leeds Industrial Tribunal unanimously ruled all-women shortlists unlawful, forcing the Labour Party to suspend 14 ongoing selection processes. However, the 34 selections already conducted with all-women shortlists were not re-opened. At the 1997 general election, almost all the candidates chosen by this method were elected, and represented a significant proportion of the historic numbers of female MPs. The government would go on to pass the Sex Discrimination (Election Candidates) Act 2002 which specifically exempted parliamentary selection from the original 1975 Act. The measure included a sunset clause which would end the exemption in 2015, but this was extended to 2030 by the Equality Act 2010. The Labour Party continued to use all-women shortlists regularly, but suspended the process for the forthcoming general election, fearing a legal challenge on the grounds that equality has now been achieved.

You can argue the merits and demerits of all-women shortlists. I instinctively never liked them because I don’t think the best response to historic discrimination is more discrimination in other and opposite directions. It should have been obvious, and I say this as a non-lawyer, that the process was at least open to legal challenge, and the unanimous decision of the industrial tribunal in 1996 demonstrated that the proponents of all-women shortlists had either hoped for the best or simply decided to rely on the brute force of self-advertising virtue rather than preparing a sound legal justification. I understand, however, the argument that the end justifies the means and that radical action was needed to kickstart the journey towards equal representation.

One of the most potent arguments against all-women shortlists was that, because by definition they excluded half of potential candidates, they lowered the competitive bar and would expose those who benefited from them to the charge, deservedly or not, that they had enjoyed an easier passage to the House of Commons than MPs chosen in the traditional way. Certainly the charge was made against a number of women. Jane Griffiths, MP for Reading East 1997-2005, told Linda McDougall she had not wanted to be chosen from an all-women shortlist “because I thought if we did, people would say—oh well, you only got it because you’re a woman”. (Griffiths was hardly a makeweight, having been a linguist at the Government Communications Headquarters and then the Asia editor for BBC Monitoring.)

Dame Eleanor Laing, now chairman of Ways and Means and deputy speaker of the House of Commons but elected for the first time as Conservative MP for Epping Forest in 1997, was blunter still. All-women shortlists, she believed, were the equivalent of saying “men can swim on their own but women always need to be wearing water wings”. Of those selected by the process, she continued:

Their male colleagues will say—oh yes, so and so, well you know, she’s OK for sitting on the backbenches, but she wouldn’t have got here if it hadn’t been for the all-women shortlists—and so you’re always a second-class Member.

I’m not sure how one would create objective criteria of talent and competence to be able to judge whether MPs elected as a result of all-women shortlists were, for want of a better phrase, “worse” than their colleagues who had faced competition from both genders. I can think of some MPs who emerged from all-women shortlists and are pretty useless, but I can’t say definitively that they are more useless than some others chosen in the standard way, nor that, their uselessness notwithstanding, they would not have been elected to the House of Commons without an all-women shortlist. However, the charge that they had been given “additional” help or advantage was made, and it is worth considering as a possible factor in causing the smooth upwards progress of gender equality to stumble for a while in the 1990s.

It may also be worth considering when those who eventually became leaders of the Labour Party were first elected to Parliament. After all, to know where you’re going, it’s important to know where you’ve been. The incumbent, Sir Keir Starmer, is unusual in many ways, but one is the swiftness of his rise to the top: he was elected in 2015, and became leader not long after the beginning of his second Parliament, in April 2020. His predecessor, Jeremy Corbyn, is also a singular case. He was elected leader in 2015, to general astonishment, having been a backbencher for more than 30 years, first returned for Islington North in 1983. (He managed “Red Ted” Knight’s campaign to be elected MP for Hornsey in 1979 but Knight was defeated by Conservative former whip and future minister Hugh Rossi by 4,000 votes.)

If they had nothing else in common, Sir Tony Blair (1994-2007) and Gordon Brown (2007-10) shared with Corbyn the quality of having been elected in 1983. It’s worth thinking about that for a moment. The 1983 general election was a disaster for the Labour Party. They were led by the courteous, witty, intelligent but far-left Michael Foot, who was approaching 70 and seemed older. The party’s manifesto, The new hope for Britain, famously and grimly described by Gerald Kaufman as “the longest suicide note in history” and noted by Denis Healey, was strong stuff, a left-wing wish list which included unilateral nuclear disarmament, withdrawal from the EEC, major tax increases for the rich, wholesale renationalisation of industry, abolition of the House of Lords, positive discrimination for ethnic minorities, the re-imposition of exchange controls and a ban on leaded petrol.

The party did not commit suicide but was badly wounded in its worst result since 1931. Only 209 Labour MPs were elected, 34 of them new or returning after an absence (as Beckett was in Derby South, having represented Lincoln 1974-79). Other new faces were Nick Brown (Newcastle-upon-Tyne East), who would be Labour’s chief whip 1997-98, 2008-10 and 2016-21; Ron Davies (Caerphilly), later Welsh secretary 1997-98 before his “moment of madness” on Clapham Common; Clare Short (Birmingham Ladywood), a former Home Office civil servant who would be the first, and long-serving, international development secretary 1997-2003; Chris Smith (Islington South and Finsbury), culture secretary 1997-2001 and the first openly gay MP; and Tony Banks (Newham North West), sharp-tongued and outspoken, minister of sport 1997-99 and later Lord Stratford.

There is a wider point here, that the men who led Labour for all but five years between 1994 and 2020 had entered the Commons in an atmosphere of defensiveness, dejection and male domination, with only 10 women among the 209 Labour MPs. Our characters and habits are shaped by a thousand influences, of course, but the parliamentary nursery, so to speak, is an important context in how politicians see the world. A House of Commons with 627 men and 23 women was a dramatically masculine atmosphere in which to learn the craft of politics. And, of course, it was dominated by Margaret Thatcher, a woman who certainly had striking feminine qualities, and exploited them to a considerable extent, but who was no friend to a “hand up” for any group, and who, in 11 years as prime minister, only ever promoted one woman to cabinet, Baroness Young, who was leader of the House of Lords from 1981 to 1983. (One other woman, Sally Oppenheim, sat in Thatcher’s shadow cabinet as shadow prices and consumer protection secretary but was only given a minister of state-rank post in 1979.)

There is an argument that the Labour Party’s roots in the trades union movement inculcated a masculine attitude and normalised male-dominated spaces. The Independent Labour Party (ILP), its forerunner which would eventually merge into the main party in 1975, was founded in 1893 around three working-class MPs who had been returned at the previous year’s general election without any support from the Liberal Party: Keir Hardie (South West Ham), a miner; John Burns (Battersea), an engineer; and Havelock Wilson, a merchant seaman (Middlesbrough). The ILP performed poorly at the 1895 general election, leading to the creation of the Labour Representation Committee (LRC) in 1900, a confederation of socialist organisations and trades unions. The LRC encompassed the ILP, the Fabian Society and the Social Democratic Federation but its sponsorship, the resources which allowed it to function, came from the trades unions.

The LRC was designed as a loose organisation to co-ordinate and support MPs who enjoyed trades union backing and represent the working class in general. After the 1906 election, its 29 MPs (up from just two in 1900) formally adopted the name of The Labour Party, and Hardie was elected chairman. (That seems inevitable in retrospect, but it took several ballots for him to prevail, by one vote, over David Shackleton, a former cotton worker who sat for Clitheroe.) Labour was a child of the unions, and it existed to champion the rights of the working class, yes, but of trades union members more specifically. It was inevitable that unions should focus on the breadwinners in families, and these were predominantly men. So of course the union movement, and therefore the Labour Party, proceeded from a starting point of male domination.

Consequences flowed from that. Working families were posited on traditional gender roles and family structures, and union members associated with each other as working men, in generally male-only spaces. There was little scope for women to penetrate these networks of connections. Jean Mann, the vice-chairman of the Labour Party in Scotland who became MP for Coatbridge in 1945 and left the House of Commons in 1959, explained the power of this in her autobiography, Woman in Parliament.

Labour men, particularly in the unions, meet together often. Friendships are made, sometimes around the bar; introductions to those who have influence in the safe seats follow.

This makes an important point: the male-dominated culture of the trades unions didn’t just result in a focus of men to the exclusion of women, it perpetuated that mindset by providing a context in which careers could be planned, supported and developed.

Male-dominated thinking has had a long tail in the trades union movement. When the unions were at the height of their powers in the 1960s and 1970s, at times seeming—and seeing themselves as—almost equal partners with the elected governments, it is “union barons” we conjure up, not baronesses: Jack Cooper, Frank Cousins, Jack Jones, Hugh Scanlon, Joe Gormley, Arthur Scargill. Right up to the recent past, there have been instances of misogyny and cultures hostile to female leadership.

The trades unions were not the only influence on the Labour Party. There has always been a strong intellectual tradition in left-wing politics which has included not just the working class but also the bourgeoisie and the upper-middle and (more rarely) the upper classes. But, while this may have represented a very different ideological tenor from the Eton-and-Oxbridge networks so familiar in the Conservative Party, it was a culture of “old boys”. Women could not be admitted as full members or awarded degrees at Oxford until 1920, and colleges were all single-sex until 1974; at Cambridge, women were not admitted to full membership of the university until 1948, while three previously all-male colleges—Churchill, Clare and King’s—began admitting female undergraduates in 1972.

These ties mattered. It has been suggested that one factor reassuring Clement Attlee to appoint the 31-year-old Harold Wilson to his cabinet as president of the Board of Trade in 1947 was that Wilson had between 1937 and 1945 been a fellow of University College, Oxford, where Attlee had read modern history in 1901-04. In a similarly exclusive way, Anthony Crosland, on whom I dwelt in my essay on big beasts, became an economics lecturer at Trinity College, Oxford, in 1947 in succession to Robert Hall, who had taught him and was appointed director of the Economic Section of the Cabinet Office, then moving to become chief economic adviser to successive chancellors of the Exchequer from 1953 to 1961. Crosland’s students in the late 1940s would include the man then styling himself the Honourable Anthony Wedgwood Benn and who would be his cabinet colleague 1965-70 and 1974-77.

There is one more factor which may contribute to the Labour Party having a “woman problem” with which I will not deal here because it requires much more space and attention than a couple of paragraphs: the knotty bundle of issues connected to gender identity, trans right and self-identification. This is one of the most hotly, bitterly contested battlefields in contemporary politics, but there is no question that some partisans feel that the stance of the party, and of the leader, Sir Keir Starmer, in particular, contribute towards a hostile environment within Labour. Those who want to read more can look at Rosie Duffield in Unherd, Victoria Smith in The Critic, Nimco Ali in The Evening Standard and reporting in The Sun and The i Paper. I’m not concerned here with which side is right, but it is undeniable that some perceive the party to have a deep-seated problem.

Sir Keir Starmer is the 19th leader of the Labour Party since it was formed in 1906. While two women have acted as leaders in a temporary capacity, none has ever been elected to the substantive post. That is an extraordinary thing, given that almost every other UK political party, from the largest down to small, regional or semi-fringe groups, have had at least one female leader. I don’t think “Meh, coincidence” is an adequate analysis of that fact, and I would characterise the situation like this. Labour’s identity rests on its being a progressive party, and it has consistently campaigned for the rights of the marginalised and disenfranchised. (I would, however, observe that women were first given the vote and allowed to become Members of Parliament by a Conservative-dominated coalition, and received equal suffrage qualifications to men under a Conservative government.)

Labour has also made greater progress than any other party in expanding female representation in Parliament and government, and in 2019 finally achieved parity in the House of Commons. These are signal achievements, and in explicit policy terms the party has been a doughty champion of women’s rights. Three of the last five deputy leaders of Labour have been women, and in 2015 and 2020 there were more female than male candidates for the deputy leadership. But I think there is some profound but unconscious emotional and cultural hesitation in some parts of the Labour Party over the notion of a woman as overall leader. I’ve tried to suggest some potential reasons for that, some roots of a tendency towards male dominance.

It may be that this hesitation simply ebbs away with the passage of time. Representation is a self-reinforcing process: just as half of Labour MPs are now women, so that will affect the culture of the party, which will in turns change the nature of those who advance through the party’s ranks. When the time comes to choose a successor to Sir Keir Starmer, whenever that may be, the milieu in which that election takes place will bear the imprint of the current composition of the party’s leadership. But I would gently suggest—I say “suggest” because I am not a Labour member, nor am I ever likely to be one—that this is not enough. I realise that the party is beginning the final approach to a critical general election, and, likely, to a return to government after 14 years in opposition. But thoughtful party members who are interested in Labour’s futures should, I think, spend a little time thinking about this striking omission from their roll-call of leaders, think about the possible reasons behind it and think about how they could address those reasons.