"Didn't you ever want to be a proper politician in your own right?" the title character in Robert Harris's novel The Ghost asks the brilliant, unlikable wife of a former British prime minister. The wife - who is not Cherie Blair, no way, don't even think about it - shoots back, "Of course. Didn't you ever want to be a proper writer?"
Oh, snap, Ms.-Not-Cherie. The character, Ruth, goes on to say that while she may know more about politics than her slightly dim husband, he's handsome and affable. Electable, in other words, "whereas I was always a bit of an ugly duckling, with a gift for putting my foot in it." (The novel was adapted by Roman Polanski as The Ghost Writer, and is currently on movie screens.)
Poor Cherie, in her time at 10 Downing St., was mocked for everything - her guru, her dubious real-estate deals, her nightgowns, her décolletage, her high-profile law career - to the point where her own adviser told her, in 2003, to "go underground. The press hate you. They have all the cards and you will never win."
Cherie is the real ghost in the current British election campaign. Her maligned spirit hangs over the wives of the three leaders of the main political parties, who are treated, quite simply, like prize cows at an agricultural fair. They don't say moo without approval in triplicate from party headquarters. The farmers trot them out and everyone compliments their glossy coats and hooves.
Except, what's this? One of them has arrived at the fair ungroomed. For shame! Last week, Sarah Brown, the wife of British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, took her shoes off at a Hindu temple to reveal feet that were classified in endless stories either as "unsightly" or "unattractive" or worse. This is a woman who used to run a socially progressive PR company, who has hugely expanded the Labour Party's Twitter following and who by all accounts has an expansive brain. But you might not know this, because the world's cameras are trained on her hobbit toes. I sincerely hope Agnes Macphail is playing pinochle in heaven and not watching this horror show.
The wife of the Conservative leader, David Cameron, also once had a real life - she was creative director of the luxury stationer Smythson. Now, on the campaign trail, Samantha Cameron has been reduced to the babyish diminutive "Sam Cam." On the Conservative Party's website, you can watch her video blogs on the "Sam Camera," where she makes coffee in her pretty kitchen and offers such policy insights as, "'Oh, I love lambs."
Samantha Cameron is pregnant, which is seen as a bonus for her husband's campaign. (I'd insert a "bump" pun here, but trust me, they've all been used.) An inordinate amount of attention is paid to her shoes, her dresses, her bouncy, gleaming hair. When this well-bred daughter of the gentry buys a dress at Zara, the tabloid newspapers beam with approval.
No one knows where any of the wives stand on any of the issues, although there is an intriguing rumour that Samantha Cameron once voted for Tony Blair. Is it any surprise, then, that the third of the leader's wives has denounced the treatment of political spouses for the demeaning sham that it is?
When asked if the coverage of the leaders' wives was patronizing, Nick Clegg's wife Miriam Gonzalez Durantez said, "Patronizing is a very diplomatic way of putting it." She added, "I think the voters deserve better, deserve more focus on the policies and less on the clothes." Unlike the other two, Durantez has chosen to remain in her office with the door shut, shunning the campaign spotlight. (Like Cherie Blair, she's a successful lawyer.)
Or maybe Clegg, leader of the Liberal Democrats, realizes that an outspoken, independent wife is in for a rough ride - look at Cherie, who survived her thrashing only because she's got the kind of skin that tank designers dream of. It feels like an age (but it's sadly not) since Hillary Clinton, then still proudly in possession of "Rodham" and campaigning for Bill's first presidential bid, was blasted for saying that she had chosen a career instead of staying home and baking cookies. And how did her advisers slide her back into the warm oven of public approval? By releasing her chocolate-chip cookie recipe, of course.
Yes, Clinton is now a powerful politician in her own right, but that makes her an anomaly - she's a political spouse who fought to stay on the international stage and not be hidden away in the kitchen. The garden is the other favourite non-threatening place to hide first wives, whether it's Michelle Obama in her organic cabbage patch or Sarah Brown, pictured kneeling among the veg on the cover of this weekend's Observer Food Monthly, above the headline, "Digging For Victory!" Did the clock roll back 60 years while I was asleep?
It's commonly accepted that a political wife, properly demure and placid in the shadows, is an asset in a campaign. She ''humanizes" and "softens." She makes the foot-stomping Brown less of an ogre, and Cameron less the sultan of smarm. But the longer women are viewed as the political equivalent of fabric softener, the longer they stay in the shadows.