Amber Rudd is being touted as the next Tory leader. Is she really the best we can hope for?

This election is heartbreaking to watch unfold. Talented women such as Green Party co-leader Caroline Lucas will never get a seat in the Cabinet

Rudd was asked to stand in for Theresa May in Wednesday’s election debate – but was that a wise decision by the Prime Minister? (EPA)

Amber Rudd has been praised for taking part in the election debate on Wednesday only two days after her father’s death, and is now being touted for a big role (Chancellor) in any future Tory government. What a turnaround: a month ago, the Home Secretary was described to me by an insider as someone who had been “over-promoted”, unlikely to survive any post-election reshuffle.

Events of the past two weeks – the Manchester bombing, a Tory wobble in the polls, a Prime Minister who seems strangely hesitant and robotic at public speaking – have propelled Rudd into the spotlight, to the extent that some overenthusiastic pundits reckon the Cambridge debate was her “job application” for the Tory leadership.

Rudd is being described as calm and capable, but haven’t we heard those adjectives before? Theresa May seems to have morphed from the woman that, at the start of the campaign, many female voters described as “efficient and practical” or “someone you can trust to get things done” into a hesitant speaking clock, repeating a limited mantra of catchphrases to diminishing effect and public derision.

This week, a local journalist in the marginal constituency of Plymouth revealed he was given three minutes to interview May, in which she answered three of his four questions with the phrase “I’m very clear”. He described the experience as “a post-modern version of Radio 4’s Just a Minute”.

Rudd has been in politics for just six years, telling interviewers that she spent her twenties having babies and her thirties “treading water”, until in her forties she decided to “take my life back”. Actually, she worked for an investment bank and then set up a recruitment agency, but her rise since being elected an MP has been impressive: an aide to George Osborne at the Treasury, then a cabinet minister since 2015.

She’s better connected socially than the reclusive May; her brother Roland is an influential PR man, formerly treasurer of the Stronger In campaign. For five years, Rudd was married to the late Adrian Gill, another ruthless networker.

Rudd’s background is posher than that of May. Her father was a stockbroker and her mother a magistrate – exactly the same as David Cameron’s. May knew how the Cambridge TV debate would pan out, and that (given her limited speaking skills) she was never going to score points, so was her decision to send Rudd in her stead a pragmatic act of self-preservation, the fielding of a key ally in her next government?

The debate was repugnant, crossing the line into an uncontrolled orgy of shouting that presenter Mishal Hussein was unable to control. We gained no insights, heard no new meaty policies to digest; there was nothing to repay us for sitting through this debacle.

My criteria for watching politicians on television is to ask myself: would I talk to a person like this at my local supermarket? No, I would not. Both the audience and the speakers were boorish in the extreme.

Shouty Britain has taken over, the election reduced to inter-generational war. Labour is dangling billions of pounds worth of goodies to gain the youth vote (a write-off of student debt and free university tuition in the future), while the Tories struggle to reassure their core voters (pensioners) they can keep their homes and won’t lose their allowances in the case of needing later-life care.

There are threats of dementia taxes, death taxes, garden taxes. Once again, we are mired in the politics of fear.

Debates generally favour bellowing men, although Rudd herself has form; remember her controversial remark in the EU referendum debate, when she described Boris (and by default Brexiteers) as “not a man you would want to drive you home at the end of an evening”? That comment is telling, because it’s one that Theresa May, if she were a more confident orator, might have made.

Beneath their nice middle-class exteriors, these women can be just as mean as men. May has long campaigned for more women at the top of government. It’s said she felt excluded from the Cameron and Osborne “boys club”.

Cameron told me (after her coronation as leader) that in spite of all the years they had worked together, he “knew nothing” about what May was really like. Who does that reveal more about? As a former grammar school pupil myself, I have always been acutely aware of the way public school boys cling together at work.

For a woman to get to the top, she needs to develop a thick skin and have fellow travellers she can confide in. Rudd might come from the same background as Cameron, but she’s a very different persona.

This election is heartbreaking to watch unfold. Talented women such as Green Party co-leader Caroline Lucas will never get a seat in the Cabinet. Voters might have to take a deep breath and accept that Justine Greening, Amber Rudd and a lacklustre Theresa May are the best we can hope for.