Don’t judge us on our ability to breed

WHATEVER her complaints about the way she was reported, Andrea Leadsom must now see that she was playing with fire.

Millions of women will agree with what she says about the positive experience of motherhood.

But millions of women, too, know to their cost how undermining it is to be judged on our ability to breed.

These are encouraging times. We have a woman as Chancellor of Germany. We are likely to have Hillary Clinton as the next US President. And we should now have impressive women setting out a case to become only the second female Prime Minister Britain has had.

Yet what ought to be a celebration has become a demeaning row.

However she intended it, Mrs Leadsom has made a critical error, raising an issue likely to wound her rival and which has dragged the debate down to a place where women – and that means all of us – are at a disadvantage. For millennia, we have been defined by our breeding, in a way men are not.

And the depressing thing about this latest hoo-hah is that we obviously still are – even by fellow women, including some of the high- est achieving in the country. It’s not even a question of whether mothers make better leaders.

Like anything which defines the people we are, both parenthood and childlessness can make us more sympathetic and sensitive people.

Just as David Blunkett’s disability made him the man he was – and therefore, arguably, a ‘better’ politician, if one wants to think in such narrow terms – so also Gordon Brown’s bereavement and David Cameron’s experience caring for a disabled child undoubtedly contributed to their characters and were highly relevant to their careers.

Yet if these three men had not experienced these things, they would have been shaped by something else – which is why such autobiographical details were never exploited for electoral support. I recall the words of my teacher, Margaret Chamberlain (probably the best I ever had). To a girl, her class considered Queen Elizabeth I the most shrewd, successful and bravest leader this country has had.

‘Ultimately, though,’ Mrs Chamberlain objected amid our howls of protest, ‘she failed – she didn’t provide an heir.’ But how could she? Marriage would have compromised her position and threatened the stability of the realm.

No king has ever faced such a dilemma. And that’s the trouble.

My mother was a superb mother and an equally superb teacher. Mrs Chamberlain, as far as I know, was childless. Neither fact surprises me. Both were matchless teachers because of who they were.