JUST JM: If Carla had only fallen for Gordon

18 August 2009

In last week’s column I may have explored the gender agenda as raised by Harriet Hormone, sorry Harman (there I go again), in a rather dismissive way.

I even poured scorn on her vision for the United Kingdom which, I suggested, she had ambitions to re-engineer as the United Femdom.

In her testosterone-reduced society women will have a larger role to play in the board rooms of the big financial institutions and no doubt in running the government.

Indeed, she has implied, and here I’m not being sarcastic but indulging in straight reportage, that if there had been a Lehman Sisters rather than a Lehman Brothers, the financial world mightn’t have collapsed quite like it did last year.

Perhaps it was foolish of me to ridicule that notion but that was before news broke that Germany and France had moved out of recession.

Both economies had grown by 0.3% in the three months to the end of June while over the same period the UK economy had shrunk by 0.8%, causing the Bank of England to say that the rehabilitation of our economy would be “slow and protracted”.

So why should Germany and France outperform the UK economy which allegedly isn’t hamstrung by restrictive employment legislation and the burden of the one size fits all euro which we have assiduously avoided adopting?

Well for a start, I reasoned, both countries still have a manufacturing base and their economies’ fortunes are not so heavily linked to the banking sector and the housing market as our own. No need for them, I thought, to create their equivalents to Lloyds Ladies, or Northern Babes, or the RBS Sisters Banking Group.

But these factors alone I realised were not enough to explain why the UK, so dynamically led by Gordon Brown, should so badly under perform compared with the economies of Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy.

Then it struck me that Harman might be right after all. Germany is run by the soft hand of an able woman and therefore has a head start on the UK but France? Well, looking at the CD sleeves rather than the calendar shots it’s Carla Bruni who wears the trousers in the Palais de l’ Elysée.

Moreover, we know that her input on foreign policy has been positive and that even her influence on the President’s predilection to bling has been benign, so why shouldn’t her influence be working on the French economy too?

The idea made me wistful. If only Gordon had met Carla before Sarah came on the scene, the transition to power and the course of our economic history could have been so different.

Instead of conflict between Gordon and Tony Blair, there could have been cosy Downing Street jamming session with the PM and Carla dueting on guitar and vocals, and Cherri and Gordon backing them on tambourine and triangle.

Sartorially there might have been some improvements as well, and given her socialist credentials, Carla might have warned Gordon about getting too cosy with the bankers too.

But of course this is all make believe and the reality is that Sarah Brown is an intelligent and supportive wife. Gender explains little and adds nothing to understanding why are we’re still in the economic doldrums while the two economies we most like to ridicule are under sail again.