This Barbie says revolution now
The Westminster Model is inherently bad and it's a waste of energy to think a rather plain 30-year-old blonde posho with a penchant for pink is the biggest existential threat to politics in the UK xxx
When Boris Johnson, after months of scandal, was ousted from office in July 2022 and unfortunately did the funniest thing by saying “them’s the breaks” in his departing speech, he got to follow convention with his resignation honours.
If you’re not aware, he, like any outgoing Prime Minister, no matter how many sexual assault allegations you could have covered up, submits two different kinds. One list is for people who get to add a little string of letters to their name, either before, like sir or dame, or after, like MBE or OBE. Personally, accepting one of these things is perplexing, especially if you claim to be a progressive because, you know, the relic of the brutality of the British Empire of it all, but THAT’S JUST ME. For my mental well-being, let’s allow those losers their fun.
The second is people he is shovelling into the House of the Lords, the rather overcrowded upper chamber of Parliament. This is a much more worthy thing to investigate, you know. It’s worth a little ire because you know it is a gig for life with a day rate of £300, and there are no pesky performance reviews. Aside from its questionable nature, the unelected lawmaker in a clapped system of governing might be my dream job. Please, someone, find me another gig with the aforementioned pay for not much work, subsidised food and drink and ample gossip opportunities.
The role wasn’t one I, a twenty-something with a 2.1 in Politics from a second-rate university, thought ever possible until Charlotte Owen, a relatively unknown special advisor, who, at the time, was also a twenty-something with a 2.1 in Politics from a second-rate university, was chosen by Johnson to bung in there. With her paid-up Tory status, I can only describe her as my Wario. In that Robert Frost poem, she went on the other path, the one I didn’t take but could have.
Obviously, her new responsibility of scrutinising and amending legislation, without a means of getting sacked or any genuine accountability, sent the chattering centrist classes into a tail-spin. Twitter was awash with conspiracy theories that she was his illegitimate daughter or someone he was shagging.
From talking heads, much of the furore was quite frankly sexist. For example, this Observer piece by Catherine Bennett, titled, ‘The Secret Diary of Charlotte Owen, aged 30¼: ‘I’m a Barbie girl, and a baroness.’ Call me a girlboss, but how is it possible in our post ‘Legally Blonde’ world to publish this tripe? Did Elle Woods teach columnists and their readers nothing?
How are we still suggesting that having traditionally frivolously feminine interests ought to disqualify you from being politically active? I hate to defend Owen because she seems like a prized twat, but liking ‘Barbie’, the highest-grossing film of 2023, does not make one incapable of forming an opinion on socioeconomic matters, no matter guilty I am of being biased. Perhaps start with the fact that she’s a right-wing ghoul?
My obsession with this story, which I’ve sent an embarrassing amount of tweets about, led my dear pal Celeste of Celestestack to send me Tortoise’s political editor Cat Neilan’s podcast deep dive into her earlier this week. The episode, titled ‘Boris’ Baroness: The Mysterious Rise of Charlotte Owen’, added fuel to my estimation that Alderley Edge’s latest representative is a rather unremarkable posho who was raised to have certain beliefs and never questioned them, or if she did, didn’t find them worth changing.
An insider told Neilan, who dealt with some of Cheshire’s finest Ranger Rover owners on her fruitless endeavour to find out much: “It is completely staggering – her peerage is one of the most strange and hardest to explain because she was so extraordinarily junior.”
I mean, take the word “junior”, according to their logic, those who support the chamber’s existence, and wonder to yourself, why not park a millennial there? Why is it so controversial to add someone so undistinguished? Alan Sugar is there! Michelle Mone has a spot! Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber, one of the many enemies of Patti LuPone, is permitted in. Her difference, alleged cronyism and all is that she has barely crossed the Rubicon to 30. I thought it was supposed to be representative of society after Tony Blair gutted the hereditaries. Why not throw some young blood in there?
Listening to the episode I enjoyed and recommended, I was just left asking, ‘Is it really “staggering”? Is it worth all this effort? Posing questions to power holders, their credentials, their beliefs and so on is justified, but surely, at some point, you have to be like, ‘Right, maybe these chancers are all like this for a reason,’ and the reason is that they are chancers. Instead of digging around for credentials for people who don’t have (most, if not all, of the people in there), save your ire for the Westminster Model itself. Get angry at how it encourages this and has no incentive for it to stop. Johnson put her and the other so-called undeserving names, not because she is his secret daughter or an ex-flame, BECAUSE HE COULD!
Plopping Owen in there and his string of other useless lackeys was a middle finger to the people who destroyed his tenure at the top.
A wanton disregard for the rules has defined Johnson’s life, even those unwritten ones that have allowed him, an Old Etonian educated at Oxford with all the right connections, to excel. His nonchalance, supported by immense privilege, is rewarded in our system. Some (me) might even go as far as to say, IT IS BY DESIGN!!!!!!! Oh, but there’s been reforms, you could say. You could exclaim that the mother of all parliaments is so malleable, so quickly improved, and has been updated tremendously. You don’t have to be a property owner or a man to get involved now, but it is the same fundamentally as it has been since 1666.
Alan Rusburger, the ex-editor of the Guardian newspaper, also enjoyed it, writing ‘If you’re not upset by Charlotte Owen, you should be’ in Prospect, which details how she was a glorified babysitter of an unruly manbaby during his time at No.10, noting Johnson’s love of history, the thing that parliament, where power centres under its looming gothic architecture, thrives on. However, once you start pulling the thread at the others sitting in there and asking why and how they got thrown there, you realise the whole endeavour is silly.
I could go on for hours about how unfair it is that if you’ve had a long career in Parliament, you get put in there, but I don’t think anyone has the time! You lost your seat, why do you get another one? Why is Ian Botham, the ex-England cricketer who is not above trying to sell me weight loss equipment via infomercials, a less silly choice than Owen? These are all questions I would like the answer to, but life is short, and I’d instead knock it down.
Westminster is an aristocratic Punch and Judy show, with its silly rules and traditions, and its silliness goes beyond Owen. She is a symptom of the system, and her appointment reminds us that we need better because it is the rule, not the exception.