Harriet Harman

‘People don’t want to share power with women’

Harriet Harman says the best measure of how far women have to go to be equal to men in Westminster is emotion. Politics is not yet a place where women can show emotion. She wishes it were, she wishes women could be as emotional or as unemotional as they liked, but if anything men have made more progress at “showing their feminine side”.

Take crying. “I definitely don’t do crying,” she says. “A man wiping a tear and everybody’s, like, ‘He’s human.’ That’s just a marvellous thing and everyone’s heart goes out to him. A woman crying. Mmm. ‘Is she weak?’”

She fixes me with eyes the colour of mint. She says that when Theresa May welled up on the steps of Downing Street in... read the full article on The Sunday Times.