Snippets and gleanings - sister act

Bring it on
I've never been under any illusion that (with the notable exception of Margaret Thatcher) systems run by women are anything other than a jolly good thing. As if to dispel any residual doubt my recent trip to Tenerife has proved the point. Our flight manager, Michelle, was an indomitable African-Caribbean no-nonsense lady who ran a tight ship. Her initial announcement that misbehaviour and bad language would not be tolerated on her watch, and that perpetrators faced arrest on arrival, set the tone for a placid trip. Having got through the chaos of entry on arrival - a process notably (mis)managed by an entirely male team - our bus driver was a woman, who handled a packed vehicle with admirable aplomb. On arrival at Santa Cruz our taxi driver was also a woman. In this macho culture we knew we were in safe hands.

Hail to the Veep
Despite what Joe Biden now appears to believe, his Vice-president is not Donald Trump but Kamala Harris. Ms Harris is one of the three women surrounding Biden who one hopes will be instrumental in persuading him of the importance to their country of standing down as the Democratic nominee in the US Presidential race. The other two are his wife, Jill, and his longtime confidante, Nancy Pelosi, the former Speaker of the House. If his post-Nato summit press conference was intended to allay growing fears about his competency calling his deputy Vice-president Trump and confusing Zelensky with Putin as the President of Ukraine was not an encouraging start. Wasn't it Lady Macbeth who said "Stand not upon the order of your going, but go at once"? She gets a bad press.

The ironic Chancellor
As the first ever female Chancellor of the Exchequer in 800 hundred-odd years (some of them decidedly odd), Labour's Rachel Reeves has the daunting task of turning round Britain's flatlining economy after fourteen years of Tory (male) incompetence. The fact that growth of 0.4% in May is being hailed as green shoots of recovery tells you just how bad things became in that time. But, as an economist and former employee of the Bank of England, Ms Reeves clearly relishes the opportunity to buck the trend. She is also rightly proud of breaking the glass ceiling of male dominance at the Treasury, saying: "To every young girl and woman reading this, let today show that there should be no limits on your ambitions." She is also reported to be breaking the urinal in her office lavatory, or at least having it removed. Flushed with success, one might say.

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