We can’t have a boys’ club in parliament – here’s why

For the first time in a decade, Rishi Sunak is presiding over the retrograde position of not having women in any of the top cabinet jobs, writes Lyanne Nicholl. We shouldn’t stand for it. Only when we get true representation will we get fair policy and governance

A meeting of the new-look cabinet following Sunak’s reshuffle (PA)

In the wake of the Covid inquiry, where Helen MacNamara highlighted how neglecting women’s voices resulted in poor policy-making, you’d be forgiven for thinking that our prime minister might heed the moral of this story and make an effort to make his cabinet more gender-balanced. Instead, he has opted to drop the number of women in his cabinet to under 33 per cent and ensured that the top four jobs are now taken by men. Meanwhile, the cabinet is now 5 per cent less ethnically diverse.

What we saw on Monday is a blow to equality and representation. Not only are the top jobs now “jobs for the boys”, but they are also a very particular type of boy. The public school and Oxbridge-educated type. Out of 350 MPs (88 of whom are women and 23 are people of colour), why could the prime minister not find the talent he felt he needed to fill the most important governing roles in the country? Is there a pipeline problem here?

The appointments of Victoria Atkins and Esther McVey take the total percentage of women in cabinet to 33 per cent, which is thankfully higher than the 24 per cent of women in the Conservative Party overall but falls below the 34 per cent of women in government. When you think that 51 per cent of the UK population is female, it is not hard to see that there remains a glaring gender imbalance at the highest level in our country.