Women – and female politicians in particular – won’t host Have I Got News for You because they are too modest; they are reticent, the show’s producers ask them again and again and the answer comes back no. At least that’s what Ian Hislop told the Radio Times. The undertone to all that talk is that women lack bravery. No need to dig into the gender essentials, just crunch the numbers: man after man, happy to give it a shot with the droll pauses and the deceptively hard-to-deliver scripted jokes, set against one solitary political female, Ann Widdecombe, a figure who will play the giddy goat with the same stoical, puzzled obedience of a boarding school pupil of yore, having ejected their lunch, ploughing through their own vomit.
I am unpersuaded by cowardice as an explanation. I won’t insult you with the greatest hits of female bravery. Let it suffice to say that if a faint heart were a notable trait of the gender, none of us would be here to remark upon it.
The life of a woman in the political sphere is, from the start, a quest against a ceaseless onslaught of trivialisation. It’s like playing Frogger – just as you have leapt the juggernaut of a gent from the old school calling you a silly girl, you have to vault the Skoda of a smooth, young type telling you to calm down, dear. It is not easy to make jokes under these conditions.
A lot of female MPs, even the ones I don’t agree with, are very witty, but you would only know it if you got chatting to them in the toilet. This additional helping of aggravation possibly weeds out all but the most purposeful, the ones who see it as a calling. While satire has all the respectability of its pedigree – it must be a force for good because: Swift. Humour is also very convenient if you’re, say, Boris Johnson and people are laughing at your buffoonery, rather than recoiling in open-mouthed horror at your fecklessness. But I can imagine an MP such as Lisa Nandy thinking it was more important to keep a conversation propelled towards some meaningful outcome, instead of erupting into laughter and dissipating into the aimlessness of that post-joke relief.
I’m just talking MPs here, of course: I have no higher purpose at all and would bite your hand off to host Have I Got News for You.
