One Mistress, No Master

Content note: This post refers to historical sexual violence, including rape within marriage.

Labour has existed for 126 years. It calls itself the party of equality. It has never once chosen a woman to lead it. [1]

This week it did it again. Andy Burnham took the Labour leadership with no contest, no vote, nothing to win, because his was the only name on the ballot. The two women whose names were floated, Angela Rayner and Shabana Mahmood, didn't even stand. Rayner endorsed him. [2]

Meanwhile three women have actually run this country. Margaret Thatcher. Theresa May. Liz Truss. All Conservative. [3] When Truss got the job, May stood up in Parliament and asked her why every woman prime minister had been a Tory. The benches cheered like someone had scored a goal, and nobody in that chamber gave her an answer.

Harriet Harman gave one outside it, and it's the truest thing anyone has said about British politics. She's been a Labour MP since 1982 and has run her own party twice, as a stand-in, when no man was available. They've never actually chosen her. Her explanation: Conservative women aren't a threat to the men in their party, because they're not trying to change anything. They play by the existing rules, so the men let them climb. Labour women turn up wanting to make the whole thing fairer, and to the men already comfortable at the top, fairer means losing something. So it doesn't happen. [1]

A woman can have power, as long as she doesn't frighten the men who already have it.

I think about that a lot, because my daughter is 12 and she wants to be Prime Minister. Not in a cute, when-I-grow-up way. She watches the news, she sees what's being done to people in this country, and something in her has already decided she's going to be one of the ones who fixes it. This week she watched how the job actually gets filled.

And the deal she's up against is older than you might think. I found its birth certificate listening to a podcast at work, the historian Kate Williams on Elizabeth the First and Mary Queen of Scots. Elizabeth became queen in 1558 and refused to marry, which everyone around her thought was madness. But really it was just maths. The law swallowed a married woman whole: from her wedding day she couldn't own anything, sign anything or go to court in her own name, and her body wasn't hers to refuse. Everything became his. [4] [5] Elizabeth saw the trap, reportedly told the man she loved she would have one mistress here and no master, and kept her crown for forty-four years by never letting a man get a claim on it. [6] Mary married. Then her husband helped murder her closest adviser in front of her while she was pregnant, and another man later abducted her, raped her and forced her into marriage. Something that male historians spent centuries blaming her for. Within two years of her first wedding she'd lost her throne. And eventually she lost her head. [7]

Two queens. One refused the men's terms and survived as the exception. The other accepted them and was destroyed. They had to pick one, because there was no third option, and that was as much the deal in 1558 as it feels in 2026.

Women have torn chunks off it since. The vote in 1918 and 1928. [8] The right to own our own property in the 1870s and 80s. [9] It took until 1991, my lifetime, for English law to accept that a husband could rape his wife. [10] Every inch was fought for. But the route to the very top never moved.

In 2005, two Exeter professors studied when women finally do get leadership. They found a pattern they named the glass cliff: the top job goes to a woman at precisely the moment it's most likely to end in failure, so the failure sticks to her name. When things go well, a man gets the job. When it's already burning, it's suddenly a woman's turn. [11] Thatcher inherited a party in a mess. May got the wreckage of Brexit. Truss got the chaos after Boris Johnson and lasted seven weeks.

By that pattern, this month was a woman's turn. Labour is polling at a projected 17%, joint third, behind Reform: as poisoned as a chalice gets. [12] She still didn't get it, because this time a popular man wanted the job. A seat was cleared for him, 379 of Labour's 403 MPs lined up behind him, and the women stepped aside. [2] Even the poisoned chalice goes to a man first, the moment a man fancies a drink.

And when the government was wobbling back in May, guess who got called in to help steady it. Harriet Harman. As an adviser. [12] Forty-four years in Parliament, trusted to hold the ship twice, trusted to advise while it sinks, never once given the wheel.

The women who do get through mostly pay the toll on the way. Elizabeth didn't rule as a woman lifting other women; she believed, like everyone around her, that women were the weaker sex, she just didn't think it applied to her. [4] Thatcher refused to call herself a feminist and put exactly one woman in her Cabinet in eleven years. [13] The exception gets through. The door shuts behind her.

Saying a woman only rose because she didn't scare the men is, flipped over, an insult to her. Thatcher would've said she got there on grit, and that demanding every woman leader pass a feminism test is just one more rule about how a woman is allowed to hold power. She'd have had a point. Both things are true at once: she rose because she fit the system, and women should get to lead without passing my politics test. Neither cancels the other.

So what's happening to Labour in the UK? Labour's own sister parties abroad do choose women. Norway's Labour Party made Gro Harlem Brundtland prime minister in 1981. Australian Labor chose Julia Gillard. The Danish Social Democrats have done it twice, Helle Thorning-Schmidt and then Mette Frederiksen. New Zealand Labour chose Jacinda Ardern, who won their biggest majority in a generation. Finland's Social Democrats gave the country Sanna Marin. Sweden's made Magdalena Andersson their first woman prime minister. [14] Same politics. Same union movements. Same supposed values. They manage it routinely. So this was never a left-wing problem. It's a British Labour problem, and the men of that party have been letting its own stated values take the blame for their comfort for a century.

Which at least tells us the fix isn't mysterious. The parties that did it didn't wait for their men to stop feeling threatened. They just kept putting women in the room until one woman stopped being the exception and started being unremarkable. Labour's members choose the leader. The membership could simply do it, the way six sister parties already have. The only thing that's ever actually been missing is the will.

My daughter doesn't know about the deal yet. Nobody's told her that wanting it won't be enough. That she'll be asked to make herself smaller, smoother, less frightening on the way up, the same toll charged to a queen in 1558, a prime minister in my lifetime, and the women who stood aside this month so a man could be crowned without a contest.

I don't want her to learn to be the exception. I want her to be the threat. I want her to walk in with all her fire still lit and refuse to pay. And more than that, I want the room to have changed by the time she gets there. Six other countries already changed theirs. It can be done. It's been done. Just never here.

Not the rage this time. Just a mother, doing the maths, and not liking the answer.

## The receipts

[1] Labour never having elected a woman as its leader in its 126-year history, Harriet Harman's two spells as acting leader (2010 and 2015), and her argument that Conservative women are not seen as a threat by the men in their party while Labour women arrive wanting to change it: Politics.co.uk, 30 January 2024; BBC News.

[2] Keir Starmer's resignation of 22 June 2026; MP nominations open 9 July and closed with Andy Burnham the sole qualifying candidate on a final 379 nominations from Labour's 403 MPs, making a rival mathematically impossible; affiliate nominations due 16 July as a formality; confirmation as leader at a special party conference on 17 July and entry to Number Ten on 20 July; Angela Rayner and Shabana Mahmood floated but not standing, with Rayner publicly indicating her support for Burnham: BBC News; ITV News; AP News; Institute for Government; Al Jazeera, July 2026.

[3] All three female UK prime ministers (Margaret Thatcher, Theresa May, Liz Truss) being Conservative, and Theresa May raising it with Liz Truss in Parliament: BBC News, 7 September 2022.

[4] Elizabeth I's refusal to marry, her determination not to hand her authority to a husband, and her own belief that she was an exception among women: The National Archives, "Elizabeth I's monarchy" (Dr Tracy Borman) and "Answer of the Queen."

[5] The common law rule of coverture, under which a married woman's legal identity was absorbed into her husband's, so she could not own property, sign contracts or go to court in her own name: William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, 1765; National Women's History Museum.

[6] Elizabeth's reported words to Robert Dudley, that she would have but one mistress here and no master, after a quarrel around 1563: contemporary court accounts, via the Inner Temple historical archive.

[7] Mary, Queen of Scots: her 1565 marriage to Lord Darnley, the murder of David Rizzio in 1566, the Earl of Bothwell abducting, raping and forcing her into marriage in 1567, her forced abdication that year, and her execution in 1587. The reading of the Bothwell marriage as abduction and rape, against older historians who treated Mary as complicit: Kate Williams, The Betrayal of Mary, Queen of Scots, 2018; National Museums Scotland.

[8] Women winning the parliamentary vote: the Representation of the People Act 1918 and the Equal Franchise Act 1928: UK Parliament.

[9] Married women gaining the right to own their own property: the Married Women's Property Acts of 1870 and 1882.

[10] Rape within marriage not recognised as a crime in English law until the House of Lords ruling: R v R [1991] UKHL, 23 October 1991.

[11] The "glass cliff," identified by Professors Michelle Ryan and Alexander Haslam of the University of Exeter in 2005: women are most likely to be appointed to leadership when an organisation is already failing. University of Exeter, REF 2021 impact case study. Also Ryan, Haslam and Kulich, "Politics and the Glass Cliff," 2010: Conservative women were given the hardest-to-win seats at the 2005 election.

[12] Labour's May 2026 local election results (around 1,500 councillors lost, projected national vote share of 17%, joint third) and the appointment of Gordon Brown and Harriet Harman to advisory roles in the reset that followed: BBC News, May 2026.

[13] Margaret Thatcher rejecting the feminist label (1978) and appointing only one woman, Baroness Young, to her Cabinet in eleven years: contemporaneous reporting; Margaret Thatcher Foundation archive.

[14] Women chosen to lead sister parties of UK Labour, each becoming prime minister: Gro Harlem Brundtland (Norwegian Labour Party, first woman PM of Norway, 1981), Julia Gillard (Australian Labor Party, 2010), Helle Thorning-Schmidt (Danish Social Democrats, 2011), Jacinda Ardern (New Zealand Labour Party, 2017), Mette Frederiksen (Danish Social Democrats, 2019), Sanna Marin (Finnish Social Democrats, 2019), Magdalena Andersson (Swedish Social Democrats, 2021): national government records; BBC News.

Sources checked at time of writing. Political facts re-verified 19 July 2026. Figures and reports current as of July 2026.