These Are Great Days

Owen Smith stepped over a far more experienced woman in order to contest the Labour Leadership.

What are these "Great Offices of State" to which he undertakes to appoint women?

Is one of them Health? Is another Education? Jeremy Corbyn has appointed women to shadow those not once, but twice. 

By the way, Liz Truss is not the first woman to be Lord Chancellor. That was Eleanor of Provence, who stood in for her husband, Henry III, in 1253.

Of the Offices that apparently count as Great, only one is of any real antiquity.

It, the office of Chancellor of the Exchequer, may be conceded its greatness, as of course may that of Prime Minister.

But the Home Office was cut in half nine years ago, and the Foreign Office is nothing like the power that it once was, especially now that Theresa May has cut it in three.

Apparently, providing services to the plebs does not count towards qualifying an Office as Great.

What matters is being a job to which the less deep-thinking 14-year-old public schoolboys might aspire, or of which they can even so much as see the point.

Well, those days are gone.