Petticoat Government

While researching literary gems for this essay I tried to find the source of "petticoat government". I looked and looked in the library English histories and dictionary biographies. I could only find one or two references to Washington Irving. Yet I distinctly remember in my old children's history of England a reference to an incident between the Tudor Queen Elizabeth and one of her most senior Ministers. I would know his name instantly.

While on urgent business at the Court, he was denied entry to the Monarch and snapped back,
 ‘I will not have petticoat government.’
His career went downhill from that outburst, possibly to the point of the executioner's axe.

It's a great and revelatory story. Therefore today it is lost in a cloud of cultural amnesia. It is a sign of the times that I somehow did not have the nerve to consult my lovely library professionals.

I was reminded of this sixteenth century incident when reading the Ian Wishart interview of John Tamahere in a restaurant and bar in the magazine Investigate. The men hungry for power and prestige bitch about living in the shadow of a powerful intellectual woman. They respect her talents and bask in her glory but somehow something is missing. Something always unspoken and hidden. Something as deep and mysterious as the red corpuscles flowing through your veins and replenishing your organs. Men know that at the last resort they hold the club and are charged to protect their and their neighbours' women and children. What women know they never exactly tell the men and men never exactly find out. I suspect there is no at least semantic coincidence that men haunt clubs and women restrooms. The twain in practice do rarely meet despite several generations of intense social engineering.

As Tamahere put it so eloquently at the conclusion of the taped and published interview,

"Men's problems are traditionally dealt with by the criminal system. Women, on the other hand, get a bloody Cartwright Inquiry and get millions of dollars thrown at their breast and cervixes. Men get nothing. You need a debate that we can tackle unfair and stupid policy with."

There was of course no debate about this – or anything else – in that interview; and there won't be while this generation of blue-stocking women run most if not all of the country's social and cultural institutions. The New Zealand born males, since they took over from immigrant Brits after World War Two, had run the country down into broad farce. I suspect when they return to power they will be of a brown or yellowish tint, or have European accents. White New Zealand born males are too craven to their clubs to run successfully anything larger than a small town or medium business. That has been consistently demonstrated.

In that distant future time, the arbiters of culture will comb through the Wishart Tamahere interview as a priceless window into a hidden history. Helen Clark will come out of this exposure as very much an antipodes Tudor Queen surrounded by ambitious intriguing courtiers with whom she plays with all the women's wiles.

The public will take as an axiom that that era was run by a female court where female preoccupations and female logic held sway over the land. Empathy was Queen. Reality, as measured by cold reasoning, rarely counted. In the inner circle, Helen Clark – like the Tudor Queen – was the most manly of all. But that is another essay.

When Tamahere later tried to retaliate against Wishart, Wishart nastily published the tape of Tamahere's ruminations about the most emphatic and illogical issue of all. That did it. Tamahere now flourished on the internet and was politically finished in today's world.

A day later Helen Clark may have almost met her maker in an air accident. As the Herald columnist (or was it Tamahere himself?) put it later,
 On that day Tamahere spilt his guts.

update: 2011

New Zealand Prime Minister John Key claims he speaks with a Viennese accent.