And the prize for consistency goes to:

…who tells The Observer that women politicians shouldn't be judged by their looks.

Caroline Flint, the minister for Europe, who is interviewed in today's Observer Woman, says media attention on her looks is insulting

She's absolutely right. Even better, she utters these timeless truths (in the news section teaser for the interview) across the space of several pages of the Observer Woman, while posing in a range of beautiful, revealing dresses while sporting the hair and maquillage of a Fifties femme fatale.

Needless to say, this softest of soft interviews (does she have leadership ambitions) doesn't find space to point out that she is the hardest, most elitist of the Blairite clique. You couldn't switch on the TV in the late nineties without seeing her advocating benefit cuts for the very poorest or some other mean-spirited, arrogant attack on the underclass, all delivered with a straight face as she claimed that sating the bitterness of the Daily Mail was socialism in action. Who cares that she's damaged the lives of women in this country (never mind the Iraqi victims of the war she loved), when she looks stunning in pastel silk?

She's hard, selfish, determined and utterly soulless - she'll go far. Still, policy is so last century - it's how she looks in a frock that seems to matter, which is an odd stance for a liberal newspaper's women's magazine to take, but there you go - we've been down the post-ideological rabbithole for a long time now.