I'm proud to be a political lioness

By SARAH VINE, COLUMNIST

Published: 18:08 EST, 8 October 2013 | Updated: 18:29 EST, 8 October 2013

Fiona-Natasha Syms took to Twitter to defend her husband Robert who she is separated from

Politics can be a brutal old game, as evidenced by Monday’s reshuffle. Egos bruised, careers curtailed, old scores settled.

Nevertheless, public displays of emotion are considered very bad form. Commons etiquette dictates that the rejected minister must at all times maintain a brave face, smiling as he or she picks their way to the exit through the rubble of their career.

For their wives, partners or significant others, meanwhile, it’s all about being quietly supportive: a sympathetic ear, a cold gin and tonic, a nice home-cooked supper. Most of all, maintaining a dignified silence.

Or is it?

On the day her husband, Robert Syms, lost his job as a Conservative whip, his wife Fiona-Natasha Syms took to Twitter in high dudgeon, describing herself as ‘beyond furious’.

She went on to suggest that he would soon be siding with backbench rebels, and joked that their children were planning to defect to Labour. It was only after a quiet word from the poor man himself (from whom she is, in fact, estranged) that she backed off, tweeting that she had been told to ‘zip it and stop lionessing’.

Now, I have never met Mrs Syms. But I like her style. For I, too, know how it feels to be hopping mad on your husband’s behalf. I, too, have occasionally lost my rag on Twitter. And I, too, have been told more than once to step away from the keyboard.

Me and Mrs Syms, we’re part of a new breed of political wife: the lioness. And we roar.

Cherie Blair was one, as is Sarah Brown. Miriam Clegg is another.

Denis Thatcher was an honorary lioness, a man widely thought to be oblivious to his wife’s travails who was, in fact, always watching her back. There are others, too: not just wives, but lioness special advisers, civil servants and private secretaries — scary ladies prowling the corridors of power. It’s like the Serengeti out there.

Fiona-Natasha Syms took to Twitter to unleash a series of extraordinary messages declaring she was 'beyond furious'

Cherie Blair (left) and Sarah Brown (right) were also political lionesses

I know I have no mandate to meddle. And I have tried, honestly I have, to be a meek and dutiful Tory wife; to emulate the sainted Norma Major with her Mini Metro and quiet opinions. But I just can’t help myself.

Every time an Opposition politician misrepresents my husband’s motives, every time some lazy hack gets their facts wrong, every time some member of the liberal intelligentsia has a pop, my hackles rise. I just can’t resist challenging them. Online, by post, person to person: I’m always getting caught up in some spat or another.

When, as sometimes happens, someone insults him in public, I pull no punches. After all, he is the elected Member for Surrey Heath and Education Secretary. I’m not. He’s not allowed to tell people what he really thinks of them. I am.

I wasn’t always such a grumpy old moggie. When he first entered politics, I was brimming with the milk of human kindness. I might even have been a little starry-eyed and idealistic, more of a cub than a battle-scarred lioness.

It took a couple of years of having the stuffing knocked out of him — and, by extension, me and the children — for me to fully comprehend the true viciousness of British politics.

Disbelief, shock, sadness, then weary resignation. And now the final stage: white-hot fury. It’s a process, and most political partners go through it. 

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not complaining. It’s a great honour and a source of immense pride to have a husband in the Cabinet. 

But I am not a robot. I cannot feign indifference. And while my husband has many faults, at least he has the courage to put his neck on the line for what he believes in.

The least I can do, as his wife, is stand up for him.

If the presenter of Autumnwatch, Chris Packham, really thinks that urban foxes are ‘beautiful’, then perhaps he would like to clean up the mess our local vixen makes of the bins.

Tamara Ecclestone sporting a pair of cream Givenchy boots

Not such a bootiful look

Designers do have some very odd ideas. Here’s Tamara Ecclestone sporting a pair of cream Givenchy boots (yours for £1,370) that look, for all the world, like a couple of loo rolls. It’s not the only pair she owns, either: she’s got them in black, too. Still, I suppose they’ll come in handy later on in her pregnancy. If she’s anything like I was, it won’t be too long before her ankles are roughly the same girth as her footwear.

Hugh Bonneville is to play Mr Brown in a new film adaptation of the Paddington books, with Julie Walters as Mrs Bird. Michael Bond’s books about the Peruvian bear with a penchant for marmalade have sold more than 30 million copies worldwide, and remain hugely popular with each new generation of children.

Why, then, has Bond — now aged 87 — never been given the role of Children’s Laureate? Why, instead, must it always go to self-regarding luvvies such as Michael Rosen and Malorie Blackman? Could it perhaps have something to do with the unashamed middle-classness of Paddington’s world, with its two well-behaved children, gentle humour and stern but loving parents?

Or is all that too impossibly suburban for the chattering classes who decide these sorts of things?

Right to show that rape

The rape of lady’s maid Anna in Sunday night’s episode of Downton Abbey came as quite a shock to many viewers.

Part of the programme’s appeal is that it’s often like the Antiques Roadshow with actors. 

Anna Bates, played by Joanne Froggatt was raped by Mr Green, played by Nigel Harman, in Sunday's episode

But the genius of Julian Fellowes is his capacity — just when we think we’ve got the measure of his creation — to make his drama the most talked about TV event of the week. Critics have argued that the rape was just too shocking for gentle Sunday viewing. But they forget that Downton is ground-breaking in all sorts of ways.

The very fact it devotes just as much time to the servants’ hall as to the action above stairs, and visits tragedy and pathos on both, makes Downton much more multi-layered than it is fashionable to admit. Which is why we love it — and the controversy it generates — so much.

Model Cara Delevingne at the River Island launch event in September

Poetess and national treasure Pam Ayres has said that her first kiss was horrible, all ‘rubbery undulations of his lips’ and unpleasant slobbering. But aren’t all first kisses? The idea is nice, of course; but the reality of waving your tongue around inevitably takes a bit of getting used to.

Except if you’re model Cara Delevingne, of course, in which case it’s contractual.

Performing her latest hit on America’s Today Show, Miley Cyrus took time out from her frantic couplings with a person dressed as a giant mushroom (don’t ask) to tell the show’s presenter, Matt Lauer, that she would keep up the raunchy performances until around the age of 40.  ‘I heard that’s when people don’t have sex any more,’ she said.

Oh yes we do, missy. Only difference is, we don’t do it live on stage in front of millions.  Not unless we’re Madonna, that is.

The fact Nigel Slater has replaced Delia Smith as the nation’s favourite celebrity chef not only reflects our changing taste buds, but also  a shift in our cultural attitudes towards cooking.

Delia is all about weights and measures, precision cooking for the cautious; Slater, by contrast, lets his stomach lead his head, which results in a more instinctive cooking style.

But it’s not just Slater’s food that’s refreshingly different; it’s also his whole approach.

For too long, convention has dictated that TV chefs  have to be puce-faced, bald-headed men with towering egos or pouting lovelies in tight sweaters and ironic pinnies.
Slater is neither. He’s just a man who likes his grub.

Maggie was far sexier than Bridget!

Two iconic females have dominated the headlines this week: Margaret Thatcher (the subject of a biography by Jonathan Aitken) and Bridget Jones (Helen Fielding’s new novel about the hapless singleton is published on Thursday).

One shaped British politics for more than a decade; the other defined what  it meant to be a young woman in the Nineties.

Unlike Bridget Jones, left, Thatcher, right, knew what she wanted, and set out to get it

Of the two, Jones is the one who would seem to have had the most enduring impact on women. Bridget (brought to life on screen by Renee Zellweger) certainly seemed to have the most fun: in the early books she was young, got drunk and went off on mini breaks with inappropriate but handsome men. Thatcher, by contrast, was all buttoned up, prim in her  pussy-bow shirts and helmet hair.

And yet of the two, Thatcher is hands-down the most enduringly attractive.

As Aitken recalled at the weekend: ‘She was a very sensuous woman.’

It’s not just that old Mitterrand line about her having ‘the eyes of Caligula and the lips of Marilyn Monroe’; it’s the fact that, unlike Jones, Thatcher never made a virtue of being a victim.

She may, indeed, have been vulnerable — who knows, she may even have flopped around on her living room floor drinking white wine and feeling sorry for herself; but she never let it show.

Unlike Jones, she knew what she wanted, and set out to get it. She set her own boundaries, and she respected them. It’s that, not an ability to drink chardonnay through your nose or twerk at 90 bpm, that really makes a woman sexy.