Let’s face it chaps - the person in charge is usually a woman

This comment and many other similar outbursts were revealed in WhatsApp messages circulating amongst various ‘high ups’ in Downing Street at the time. However, when thinking about it, I suspect that not many married men or those in a long-term relationship would be surprised by that fact at all, now would they? Funnily enough, I reckon that if you reverse that scenario, recent female premier’s husbands (e.g. Mr Truss aka Mr O’Leary and Mr May) would be barely recognised outside of their own households, let alone listened to in terms of national politics. I put this theory forward so as to underline the case of women being the power behind the throne, whether this be about national politics or the domestic lives of citizens almost everywhere. Put unequivocally: men like to think that they run things, but mostly women actually do the doing.

At its lowest political level, my mother and father were members of the Labour Party during the 1960’s and beyond; but in terms of activism, whilst mum would deliver leaflets and be outside of polling stations marking on a sort of score-sheet which way a person voted - dad would be sitting at home on the sofa shouting at random Tory politicians who had the temerity to appear on the television. Yet he was seen to be the political ‘activist’ in our family. Funny that! I know that some men out there in Bulletin-land would argue with this assertion - but mostly men like to talk about stuff, whilst women actually do stuff.

On a more mundane level than politics, I have this theory (more a certainty actually) that it is women who generally make the key decisions in family life and then rather cleverly ‘sell’ these decisions to the male of the species complete with the fantasy that it was his decision in the first place. Bloody brilliant, if you think about it! For instance, has a man ever planned a holiday abroad from beginning to end whilst ‘crossing every T and dotting every I’ yet giving the impression to friends and relations that every aspect and decision of the said holiday was his - and his alone? No, never ever! It also has to be remembered that women are nothing if not subtle in their approach to decision making.

For instance - if Mr Bloke particularly likes an item of furniture for the house, or a shirt that she clearly doesn’t approve of….does it get purchased? Of course it doesn’t, unless of course she is planning an expensive purchasing coup of her own and needs old dopey’s seal of approval that she would get anyway ‘cos that’s what always happens doesn’t it? It’s the same when organising a night out; mostly we men are manoeuvred, non-too subtlety, to places that our womenfolk want to go to, rather than some dreadful pub where ‘everyone knows his name.’

So then, in conclusion, is it surprising at all that Carrie Johnson actually ran large segments of the British government during the early days of Covid whilst her husband was blathering incoherently to both his Downing Street staff and the nation? Hey, please don’t answer that.