When Hillary Clinton tweeted her presidential campaign into being this month, it generated serious excitement among British aficionados of U.S. politics. Despite the imminence of our own general election, Clinton's announcement caused a tidal wave of commentary here, along with particularly intense discussion of whether a female president would automatically constitute a victory for feminism.
The argument chimes with a sudden shift in the visibility of senior women politicians in the United Kingdom itself - a movement prompted by various developments in the substance and the style of British politics. In a country where women's political representation remains among the worst in Europe - 25 years after its first and only female Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, left office - that's certainly a trend worth watching.
The trigger point has been the magnified role of televised pre-election debates among party leaders. These are still very new to us; the first took place just prior to the 2010 election and featured the all-male leading cast of Britain's three biggest parties: Conservative leader and subsequent Prime Minister David Cameron, his Labour opponent, incumbent Gordon Brown, and Nick Clegg of the Liberal Democrats, the smaller party that is now partner to the Conservatives in the outgoing coalition government.
But on April 2 this year, in an event broadcast on the United Kingdom's major commercial channel, ITV, seven leaders strode out to claim their share of the airtime - and three of them were women. Two weeks later, in the BBC's "challengers' debate" held among the five parties not presently in government, these three women outnumbered the men for one historic moment.
In the intervening five years, change has been effected as much by the extraordinary state of UK politics as by the qualities of the women concerned. The reality of coalition government itself has had an impact: It would hardly have been fair to force Labour leader Ed Miliband to appear as the lone opposition to the two parties of government, meaning another three-way debate was out of the question.
Meanwhile, longstanding dissatisfaction about the convergence of the main parties at the political center has fueled the rise of more radical alternatives on both ends of the spectrum: on the right, the UK Independence Party, led by Nigel Farage, and on the left, the Green Party, led by Natalie Bennett, who is the only female leader of a UK-wide political party.
But the most recent and explosive change of all was last year's referendum on Scottish independence, which saw support for the Scottish National Party rocket upward, with mortifying results expected to ensue for UK-wide parties at the upcoming polls - and especially for Labour, which had long dominated Scottish politics. In this climate, the SNP could hardly be excluded from the leaders' debates, and their leader, Nicola Sturgeon, is generally acknowledged to have put in a formidable performance - a revelation only to those south of the border. Sturgeon has since been labeled both as a kingmaker who will decide whether or not to push a liberal-left coalition between Labour and the Liberal Democrats over the line, and as the most dangerous woman in Britain.
And if one nationalist party was to get their invitation to the debates, that meant an opportunity for another. Step forward, then, Leanne Wood of Wales' Plaid Cymru. The Welsh party has more seats in Parliament than UKIP and the Greens, yet Plaid Cymru had long been treated as a political irrelevance by the United Kingdom's notoriously London-centered media. Wood's contribution in fact produced the most meme-friendly moment in the seven-way debate, when she told UKIP leader Nigel Farage "you should be ashamed of yourself" for his comments on foreign nationals seeking HIV treatment in the United Kingdom.
Change moves to the center
Of course, a few over-egged headlines and some decent YouTube ratings do little to alter the fact that none of these women has the slightest chance of becoming prime minister in an electoral system which will favor the two major parties for the foreseeable future. But change may also be in store from that direction before too long.
When Cameron spoke in March of his possible successors as Conservative leader, naming current Home Secretary Theresa May among them, he merely confirmed what Westminster-watchers had long known, which is that May has used her term in arguably the most challenging ministerial role of them all to shape herself into the first credible female contender for a generation.
Meanwhile, May's opposite number on the Labour side, shadow Home Secretary Yvette Cooper, has been spoken of as a leader-in-waiting for as long as Miliband has occupied the throne, and in fact longer. All of which makes the prospect of a future prime ministerial contest between two women, followed by five years of two female voices raised against each other at the infamously boorish affair that is Prime Minister's Questions, a very realistic one.
We have yet to see what the long-term impact of any of this will be. The Conservatives or Labour may yet win an outright parliamentary majority, or at least enough seats to form a deal with only the Lib Dems. Perhaps the major party leaderships will elude May and Cooper, and all then may revert to business as usual. But as Britain charts novel political territory, the sight of modern-day, politically eclectic female leadership is an important reminder that narrowness and uniformity are not inevitable.
(AP photo)
