Just months before the US looks set to elect a female President both main UK party leaders could be women
The dramatic feminisation of the political world
Today, just a week after the referendum, there’s expected to be big developments over the Conservative and Labour leaderships.
Nominations for the successor to Cameron close and reports suggest that Angela Eagle will announce that she’s seeking the 51 required nominations to contest the Labour leadership.
The latest YouGov poll of Conservative members, the group that will ultimately decide the party leadership and next PM, has unexpectedly found that the Home Secretary, Theresa May, has a substantial lead over the ex-mayor, Mr Johnson. In a head to head match the pollster found that Theresa is 17% ahead of Boris. The widespread assumption before was that his biggest leadership challenge was going to be getting onto the ballot not whether he would win with the membership.
With Labour’s leadership crisis continuing and the hapless Corbyn clinging on in spite of being rejected by his parliamentary colleagues the next move looks set to be Angela Eagle making a formal challenge. If that happens and she wins then we could have both Conservative and Labour leadership elections taking place at about the same time with new leaders in place in September.
All this occurs, of course, in the run up to November’s White House race with US polls pointing to widening leads for Hillary Clinton over the presumptive Republican nominee, Mr. Trump.
An enormous amount, of course, could happen as all these contests unfold but there must be a reasonable chance that these three posts could all be held by women.
I wonder whether there might be a spin-off effect. Could the prospect of a woman CON leader and PM make it easier for Labour to choose a woman for the first time?
Whatever we’ve got another interesting political day ahead of us.
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