The extraordinary turn of events whereby Britain acquired a new Prime Minister, Theresa May, nine weeks before anyone expected, owes a great deal to the circumstances surrounding the withdrawal of Andrea Leadsom from the race. And that, in turn, is almost entirely because of the furore that followed her observation in an interview with The Times that “genuinely I feel that being a mum means you have a very real stake in the future of our country, a tangible stake”. Indeed, she had made a point during the Brexit TV debate of prefacing her remarks with: “As a mother…”
Cue an avalanche of negative publicity, a Twitterstorm of hatred, a tsunami of resentment from the wilfully or unwillingly childless which would have startled a less sensitive soul than Mrs Leadsom. Among the more temperate observations was one from a colleague, Alan Duncan: “I am gay and in a civil partnership. No children, but 10 nieces and nephews. Do I not have a stake in the future? Vile.”
She seemed genuinely taken aback by the fact that she had become an instant hate figure, the Sarah Palin of British politics. There was some controversy about her failure to publish her tax returns, but her Christianity was a more potent additional ground for mockery. What fun the critics had with the notion that she takes part in Bible studies. As her supporter Iain Duncan Smith observed: “We have seen the most remarkable, almost unprecedented attempt to cast Andrea Leadsom in the most ridiculous way… There were … references to her Christian belief as though somehow she were an extremist.”
But it was the motherhood argument which overrode all else, and became somehow conflated with her Christianity: “a Fifties throwback” was among the kinder columnist observations.
What are we to make of that, apart from the obvious point that online lynching is a kind of psychic assault, unacceptable even for those who get on the wrong side of feminists? It’s worth observing here that the London mayor, Sadiq Khan, made much of his teenage daughters during his campaign for election without being hounded for it. Childlessness is obviously not a handicap in running for office but that is not to say that the converse, having children, is not an asset. In Scotland none of the party leaders has children; indeed, two are lesbian, Kezia Dugdale for Labour and Ruth Davidson for the Tories. That makes those at the very apex of Scottish politics look notably unrepresentative of the mass of electors, who aren’t averse to the notion that their leaders have the same problems with schools and bringing up children as they do.
Catholics have an interesting take on all this. The hierarchy is, or is meant to be, celibate; priests and religious make a promise not to marry or take a vow of chastity. And obviously this isn’t as a consequence of a quasi-Manichean rejection of family life but as a consequence of other choices: to embrace life in community; to devote oneself to the service of others, to follow the example of Christ.
Until very recently the formative influence on many children’s lives was that of nuns, women who were childless by choice as a function of their vocation. I and lots of my contemporaries are in their debt; we were their surrogate children. As Mr Chips’ wife observed in the film about her role as schoolmaster’s wife: “I have hundreds of children, and they’re all boys.”
Nonetheless, Catholics have a keen sense of the value of motherhood and indeed marriage: children are one of the pre-eminent worldly goods. And at a time when stable heterosexual marriage is by no longer the normative environment for raising children, the Church has done its best to uphold its teaching that marriage and children go together, without seeking to suggest that the infertile are somehow second class. I don’t think it would come naturally in the Church to suggest that celibates do not have a stake in society, even if their perspective goes rather further than the next generation, right through to eternity.
But Leadsom was entitled to take pride in her children, to suggest that they give her an additional reason to worry about the world they will make their way in. It’s a natural impulse and a laudable one because the implication is that you’re concerned with society, not just your own family.
Leadsom may not have been an impressive candidate – indeed, the accepted view seems to be that she never remotely thought she would end up in the final running – but we should, I think, be concerned about the anti-natalist backlash she evoked. If the childless-by-choice can feel able to lynch a perfectly decent if woefully tactless woman for being proud of being a mother, it suggests something rotten about the culture.
Melanie McDonagh is comment editor of the London Evening Standard
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