Parliament’s still so male and pale

“Rumours that Michael Gove and Jeremy Hunt are provisionally booked in for sex change ops next spring are currently unfounded.”

It’s timely, though ultimately depressing, that just as filming began in Parliament on the film, Suffragette, the issues of equality and women’s representation are back on the agenda.

The movie stars Meryl Streep as Mrs Pankhurst battling for the rights of women more than 100 years ago.

Now, 95 years after the first woman MP walked through Westminster’s doors the first film director is following her.

No marches, rallies, jaunty anthems and unpleasant campaigns of civil disobedience were required for the film stars to be allowed in, though. This change of heart was driven by something far more base Parliament needs the money.

Faced with a ruinous bill for upgrading the creaking Parliamentary Estate the committee in charge of running the place suddenly found they could put their distaste for popular culture aside and let the right sort of films be made.

Exactly what the right sort of films will turn out to be remains to be seen but something about Suffragettes and starring Meryl Streep, who, after all, only recently played Margaret Thatcher and has never appeared in a film offensive to anyone, certainly fits the bill.

And so with MPs on their Easter hols and an awful lot of them including the PM are taking a break just now since there’ll be no summer holidays as the Scottish independence referendum hoves into view the corridors of power will echo to the cry of: “Cut!” for the first time since Charles I was convicted of treason in Westminster Hall and sentenced to have his head removed.

Unfortunately, the modern-day goings on of the last week suggest attitudes have not moved on as much as the Suffragettes might have hoped when they finally achieved victory in 1918 (though it would be another 10 years before the franchise for men and women was equal).

As inevitable as Maria Miller’s resignation the combination of the dread word “expenses” with her fairly poor personal manner and the fact some of the media were out to get her ever since she piloted Lord Leveson’s press regulation proposals through Parliament saw to that was the following furore over the number of women in the Cabinet.

Should the Tories win next year one thing David Cameron is sure to have learned from his first term in office is not to go around shooting arbitrary targets.

Once again at Prime Minister’s Questions this week a backbencher asked him about his claim that immigration will be down to the tens of thousands by 2015. It won’t.

And he is similarly haunted by the pledge to make a third of his ministerial team female.

Rumours that Michael Gove and Jeremy Hunt are provisionally booked in for sex change ops next spring are currently unfounded but such drastic action may be necessary if the PM is to keep his word.

Miller was replaced by a man, Sajid Javid. Though the way the Westminster village reacted to his appointment, dubbing him the first elected Asian man to sit in Cabinet, only showed up how otherwise pale and male the political establishment is.

Miller was also Minister for Women and Equalities. That brief was handed to another woman, Treasury Minister Nicky Morgan, before Downing Street remembered that Morgan doesn’t like gay marriage so the equalities part was given back to Javid.

All of which led to the impression of tokenism on the part of Number 10.

And whilst folk can argue about just where on the list of Government priorities the issues of women and equalities should sit they are too important to be treated in that way.

The filming of Suffragette may be historic as the first movie to be shot on location in parliament and the characters and costumes will mark it out as a period piece but it seems the struggle which it is centred on remains relevant in Westminster.