Gaby Hinsliff

“[P]opulists offering easy answers hate nothing more than the long, boring, mercilessly exposing business of trying to put them into practice. If the biggest risk to Reform is being shut out of power, then the second biggest might be winning it.”

“It's not that we're necessarily desperate to get into your club. It's more that we learned the hard way to be suspicious of men who want to keep us out.”

“When men wonder why women won't just let them have their cosy little clubs in peace, one answer is that we fear the mentality those cosy little clubs can sometimes produce.”

“The opening scene of Breathtaking, in which fictional consultant Abbey Henderson discovers that a mask meant to protect her from a deadly virus doesn’t fit because it was shaped for male jaws, meanwhile almost uncannily echoes the evidence given by senior civil servant Helen MacNamara to the Covid inquiry last year about how hard it was to get the problems women were experiencing with PPE taken seriously in Whitehall.”

“[A]ll the wrong people are in the spotlight. We have spent too long demanding that famous faces justify what they earn, rather than asking their anonymous managers to justify what they pay. It's not enough for salaries to be transparent if the assumptions underpinning them are shrouded in mystery. For if nobody will tell you the rules of the game, then it's impossible to know if somebody somewhere is cheating.”

“But the reason I'm not naming Sex Kitten Man either is that making this about any one particular idiot risks letting all the other idiots off the hook.For the point is it could have been any idiot.”

“So I didn't say anything, and for years continued to have a perfectly professional and often productive (in story terms) working relationship with Sex Kitten Man. And he rose into cabinet, where eventually his career imploded over an entirely unrelated error of judgment. Well, I say unrelated; a man who once did something slightly stupid went on to do something much more stupid.”

“Female friendships are built on knowing about the minutiae, and just like news, they require your presence.”