Melanie McDonagh

When I went to work at Foyle’s Bookshop as a student, when the owner Christina Foyle still ran the place, she would interview you and ask very kindly what your interests were: history, literature and cooking, you’d tell her. Then you’d find you’d been put at the cash till at some distance from all these departments. It was the same for everyone: economists ended up in fiction; pop fiends in natural science. It’s rather the impression you get from the reshuffle.

When Sadiq Khan was doing the rounds in his mayoral campaign he would, every so often, include some reference to his two daughters. He didn’t make a big deal of it; this wasn’t creepy or boastful in a Donald Trump way but the message was clear: he was an ordinary bloke and having a couple of daughters meant he had skin in the game when it came to issues such as law and order and schools. It also helped make the point that he was a Muslim feminist. He showed that it was quite possible for parenthood to be an asset in politics without its converse, an inability to have children, being a disadvantage. It’s one of those things that’s a plus but not a minus the other way.

Well! It hasn’t taken long for the commentariat to get over their excitement at the prospect of another female prime minster, has it? Can you imagine what the Guardian would be making of it were the contest between Angela and Maria Eagle, Venus and Serena Williams-style (or even, David and Ed Miliband-style)? It’d be triumph for feminism, a belated victory for the kind of positive discrimination gender politics which has proved so terrifically successful in the Labour party. Well, it turns out that it’s not just a woman that feminists wants, it’s a particular kind of woman. Their kind of woman. No others need pretend to the gender. The knives, in short are out for Andrea Leadsom.

Forget footwear. The most telling thing about Theresa May, as suggested in interview with Robert Peston, is her cookbook collection – she has 100. Her remarks about her cookery writer of choice was an extraordinary exercise in character signalling. 'Delia is very precise,' she said, 'and I like a bit of… throw a bit here and a bit there, and Ottolenghi is really interesting in the stuff that he does. Right. Unless you’re a member of the smirking liberal metropolitan elite – or, like me, a cookbook reviewer – or Theresa May, you may not be familiar with Yotam Ottolenghi, but this is as clear an indicator as you can get that you’re a cosmopolitan internationalist with a free and easy approach to immigration.

Call it femocracy or gynocracy (my preference), or, a new age of women, as Justine Greening has it, the excited consensus is that we’re in for a benign new world of female governance. Hillary in the US, Theresa May over here, Ruth Davidson and Nicola Sturgeon in Scotland, Angela Merkel in Germany…what could be more lovely? Except possibly the addition of Marine Le Pen at the helm in France, though oddly enough feminists rarely bring her into the new scheme of things… she’s up there with Sarah Palin as an female unmentionable. Oh and let’s not forget Angela Eagle as potential Labour leader, whose tearfulness as she knifed Jeremy Corbyn with her resignation this week was, I suppose, endearing to some.

Nick Clegg has written an interesting column for the Evening Standard today about the referendum result. You will not be surprised, reader, that he’s not altogether happy about the outcome. But what’s especially interesting is his insistence that: '…there will have to be a general election shortly after the new Conservative leader is elected. The country did not elect a Brexit government last year. The millions of voters who gave David Cameron the benefit of the doubt did so, above all, because they were worried what would happen to the economy if Ed Miliband and Alex Salmond were in charge… And when we vote in that general election, the key question will be this: do we agree or not to the terms of our exit from the EU?

It does seem to me that there’s been a misunderstanding about what, exactly, a referendum is about. It’s not a general election. It’s not about electing a party with a manifesto. It’s simply getting an answer to a specific question, in this case, whether to stay in or leave the EU. So when disgruntled Remainers complain that there is no blueprint for the future, no grand plan for the way ahead, no specifics about immigration reduction, no answers about getting access to the free trade area, all you can say is, that’s not what it was about, people. There was a coalition of disparate interests behind the Brexit side, from Labour to Ukip, and all they had in common was that they wanted out of the EU.

The Irish prime minister, Enda Kenny, was quick off the block to react to the referendum result – see his speech below. Having done his utmost to galvanise support among the Irish in Britain for Remain, with no discernible result (though Bob Geldof’s parallel efforts may have driven thousands to Brexit) he’s now getting to grips with the consequences. They are potentially dicey for Ireland; Britain is Ireland’s biggest trading partner – forget German car manufacturers as potential losers from tariffs – and restrictions on free trade would do the country real harm.

Just wondering: is there anyone out there who actually remembers supporting Turkish membership of the EU? Last night Sadiq Khan said the Brexit camp had been scaremongering with its 'big fat lie' that Turkey would join any time soon. (NB: Sadiq was a bit free with the 'lie' word; a generation ago, its use would have caused real offence; two generations ago he’d have been called out by the person he accused of being a liar. Ruth Davidson was more measured with her use of 'untruth'.)  And Boris Johnson did look a bit abashed, though his retort ('I am a Turk') got lost in the exchanges. For he too was one of the most eloquent supporters of the Turkish bid when he was editor of this paper.

London is going through one of its periodic fits of smugness right now, for which the only real parallel is the US after the election of Barack Obama first time round. I refer, obviously, to the election of Sadiq Khan as the first Muslim mayor of a major European capital. 'Doesn’t it do us proud?' one of my friends observed. A nice young colleague told us she had wept – wept – twice in the course of the weekend. 'He took a bus to City Hall,' she marvelled. 'It was a victory over bigotry,' another friend observed, the bigotry obviously being Zac Goldsmith’s campaign, for raising the whole Islamic extremism thing. I don’t know how many times I heard people observe highmindedly, 'London’s not like that,' or 'They misjudged London'.

So good to see Boris Johnson making the obvious case for Brexit, namely that the Turks are at the door. And it’s not just the imminent prospect of visa-free travel for 75 million of them as part of the deal that Angela Merkel struck with that problematic individual, Recep Erdogan, that we’ve got to worry about. The other, longer-term threat of Turkey actually joining the EU should also be cause for concern. That process has been expedited, too, as part of the Greek migrant exchange which the Pope was so cross about.

Personally, I love referendums. It’s the notion that the people really can have things their way which is so pleasing, unlike the normal state of affairs when every issue of importance is bundled up in a party political package in a general election which makes it effectively impossible to unpick, say, your candidate’s approach to assisted dying from their party’s approach to income tax. My favourites are the ones when, as with the Swiss vote on banning minarets, the people listen carefully to the considered  opinion of big business, the churches and the major parties…and then go and vote exactly the opposite way.

Stop me if I haven’t got this right. But as I understand it, as a result of the deal that the EU struck with Turkey earlier this week to get it to keep more migrants who’d otherwise end up in Greece and then Germany, the EU will now be expediting the process whereby Turkey becomes an EU member even though only three per cent of it is actually European. So…in order to stem a flow of migrants that could, at worst, amount to over a million people this year, we are admitting to the EU a country with a population of 75 million, any of whom would then have the right to live and work anywhere in the Union. It seems like an odd sort of cost-benefit calculation; I’d just bung them the cash, myself.