sayeeda warsi

...or at least his party does, much more eloquently than any of the debates on the subject in either house of parliament:

In ConservativeHome's current poll of support amongst Tory members for their leader's choice of Shadow Cabinet Davis tops shadow cabinet league table again with Warsi at bottom.

Listed below are the rankings given by 1,274 Tory members for twenty-seven shadow cabinet ministers

1. David Davis: +79% | 88% satisfied, 9% dissatisfied
...
27. Sayeeda Warsi: -20% | 19% satisfied, 39% dissatisfied

Now, I am perfectly willing to concede the distinct possibility that she could have got +19% just for being anti-gay and -39% just for being of a race and gender that grassroots Tories do not consider as belonging to the governing classes, but it strikes me that this might come to be a case of "act in haste, repent at leisure". For in his haste to add a bit of colour to his shadow cabinet, Cameron neatly side-stepped the democratic process, as others have done certainly in the past just as egregiously, and made this woman a permanent member-for-life of the UK's legislature.

Actually, anyone who has seen her on television can see why Tory members would disapprove. She comes across as loud and boorish. If I were a Conservative member I'd probably cringe that she was representing my party on Question Time too. But that's not the point of this really. It's merely the fact that she is now there for life, or at least for as long as she deigns to grace the second chamber with her presence.

Indeed, it seems worse that this is someone who had attempted to get elected and had failed - she doesn't merely not have a mandate in common with all her fellow members of the second chamber, she went for one and the people, the core of our democracy in theory, didn't give her one. I've opined before that, as a rule, we should be even more wary of giving defeated ex-MPs a permanent consolation prize in the form of a peerage - let alone defeated candidates who have no prior experience of government. Those who step down voluntarily are somehow slightly less of a democratic outrage, but only just - as we shall see again when the former Deputy Prime Minister takes the ermine.

Still, it's done now. She has presumably had her letters patent and is now immovable, short of making anti-gay statements a thought crime which might land her in chokey and potentially disqualify her from sitting - though that would disqualify half the Tory benches in the Lords before her. Whether the grassroots Conservatives like it or not, she is likely to remain representing them for as long as she likes. Appointed peers are simply not the answer to the democratic deficit at the core of our legislature, and the sooner the Marquis of Minster Lovell finally gets round to finishing the job his government promised to do ten years ago the better.