London Diary: Glass ceiling? What glass ceiling?

The rate at which the so-called glass ceiling in British politics is being smashed has already become yesterday’s news. 

In July, the Labour party’s Shabana Mahmood, daughter of Pakistani immigrants, was appointed as Britain’s first-ever Muslim woman secretary of state, also known by the grander title of Lord Chancellor.

Now, the Tories have chosen the party’s first black woman as its leader to replace Sunak. This makes Nigerian-origin Kemi Badenoch the first black female leader to run a major European political party.

Badenoch (44) defeated the quintessential Tory stereotype—pale, male and middle-class Robert Jenrick in one of the longest and most divisive leadership contests.

She becomes the fourth female Tory leader, after Margaret Thatcher (her political heroine), Theresa May and Liz Truss. The Labour Party has never had a female leader.

Badenoch’s triumph is seen to symbolise a remarkable shift in attitudes towards race in the Conservative Party and in Britain.  

“We are a much more mobile and culturally diverse country today,” said Kwasi Kwarteng, a former cabinet colleague of Badenoch’s, and the first black chancellor of the exchequer, who was elected MP in 2010. 

She herself refers to her story as the “British dream”—the belief that anybody can come to the country and achieve success through merit.

Asked how it felt to be the first black person to lead a large political party, Badenoch said: “The best thing will be when we get to a point where the colour of your skin is no more remarkable than the colour of your eyes or your hair.”

John Taylor, the Conservatives’ first black borough councillor, and its first black parliamentary candidate in the 1992 general election, said that Britain was “a very different place” today.

His campaign was marred by racism as constituency Tories rebelled against his selection on the basis of his skin colour.

Those were definitely not the days.

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No more ‘Tories’, please

For nearly 200 years, Britain’s Conservative Party has been colloquially known as the Tory Party and its members as Tories—named after upper-crust monarchists and high church Anglicans.

But now the party’s election strategist Lynton Crosby, who masterminded Conservative campaigns for two decades, has urged the Conservatives to stop calling themselves Tories because the term has, according to him, become ‘pejorative’.  

This follows nearly a decade of turbulence in the party amid a series of scandals involving some of the leading Tory grandees including Boris Johnson whose premiership has become a byword for sleaze, chaos and political hubris.

Calling upon its new leader to restore its old values, he said: “They ought to call themselves Conservatives and not abbreviate it to Tories. I think ‘Tory’ has become a pejorative term … Labour would never call themselves the Socialists.”

Interestingly, Etymology Online tells us that Tory did indeed emerge as a derogatory term in 17^th century England, referring in English state papers to ‘an Irish outlaw’ (derived from the Irish toruighe  meaning ‘plunderer’).

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She’s got your back

Anisha Joshi is an award-winning London-based osteopath and counts some of the biggest celebrities and professional athletes among her clients.

Her new book, Heal Your Back, is being hailed as a must-have manual for people with back problems.  In other word, every second or third Brit.

She catalogues a series of risk factors including lack of exercise, ageing, obesity, smoking and stress. She also notes that lower back pain is the primary cause of disability worldwide, most commonly afflicting those aged between 50 and 55. 

Among the myths she tries to puncture is that posture is the cause of back pain.  When people tell her, “I sit really badly,” she says it’s more that they’ve sat at their desk for hours without moving.

“You can sit up straight like a royal princess for the whole day and still you’d feel your back. You need to move—change position regularly,” she advises. 

By the way, if you wake up and your neck’s stiff, twist it ‘slightly, slowly, gently … a few millimetres to one side, then back’. 

The book is full of such elementary wisdom.

Joshi is known to have said that she always wanted a career where she could help people feel better. The fact that it’s also helping her make lots of money can’t hurt.

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Trump trouble for David Lammy

British foreign secretary David Lammy once described Donald Trump as a “neo-Nazi-sympathising sociopath”. This comment has come back to haunt him as Britain seeks to court Trump after his return to power.

Lammy has sought to play down the controversy by dismissing his comment as “old news”. That has not stopped rumours that he could be replaced to assuage the POTUS.

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And, finally, a story about tourists visiting the picturesque and posh Italian lakeside town of Como in northern Italy being sold sealed cans of ‘Lake Como air’ has reminded many of Cindy Cashman’s 1988 book, Everything Men Know About Women, which has 300 pages, all of them blank.