Looking behind David Cameron at the manifesto launch

I hadn’t been to the wreckage of the Battersea Power station before. It is spectacularly wrecked to be sure. One of the great tombstone emblems of the failure of Eighties urban renewal. It last pumped power in 1981. It has defied politicians and money makers alike ever since.

It struck me as a potentially dangerous place to stage the launch of a bid for any kind of power, political or otherwise. Less for the threat of falling masonry, than for the references to all-party political failure that the entire site represents.

When I first saw the setting, I inevitably thought of the Conservative phrase ‘Broken Britain’. So far so good. But I was in the tented arena within the power station in time to watch the ‘backdrop’ evolve.

Swarms of pale blue T shirted individuals moved about. My eye fell upon the familiar face of the articulate erstwhile Labour adviser David Freud – now neatly T shirted and recast as an articulate present Tory adviser.

But it was what was happening behind the speakers’ lectern that intrigued. A clutch of beautifully turned out young women were assembling. Here and there, gaps were left in the tiered seating. Was their event to be so feminised that ALL the faces behind the manifesto launching leader would be female?

Enter ten men and two women to fill the gaps between the eighteen young women – a slice of the shadow cabinet. I was particular struck by the photographic doughnut being established most immediately behind where the leader would stand. A striking young South East Asian woman, another from the Indian subcontinent, and so on.

All three major parties are desperately short of women in credible positions of influence. Does this explain the disporting of ‘leaders’ wives’? Is the feminisation of the backdrop is yet another stunt to try to disguise this truth? Why, so long after emancipation is British politics still so dominated by men?