By Janet Daley
I’m sure that Iain Dale’s lament for the absence of female pundits on the Right from broadcast current affairs is kindly meant. I’m afraid that it is also rather naïve. There is a perfectly understandable reason why the same handful of male commentators appears repeatedly on the air: because they are the ones who are willing to do it.
Like most political columnists, I receive an average of two to three requests a week for broadcast interviews or discussions, about three quarters of which I turn down (or, I’m sorry to say, ignore, as they generally come in the form of voicemail messages).
Sometimes this is because they are on subjects in which I have little interest or specialised knowledge (the current week’s crop included a request from Newsnight to debate Ronnie Biggs' release from prison, and Radio 4’s PM wanting me to talk about Hillary Clinton’s outburst). But very often it is simply that I am not prepared to push aside professional or domestic responsibilities at short notice for a six-minute spot on the air, which will involve roughly two hours of travelling and waiting-around-in-a-green-room time.
And I know that I am not alone among female journalists for taking this attitude. Whereas many (if not most) of our male equivalents will abandon absolutely anything – including their hapless colleagues at the office who must cope in their absence, or their own dinner guests – in order to appear on any television or radio programme that chances to invite them, women will not.
Those ubiquitous male pundits may have earned a reputation among the desperate programme researchers who spend their entire lives on the phone running down the list of possible participants, as being always available at a moment’s notice. Good luck to them. But remember that the person you are seeing on the screen was not necessarily the first one who was asked.
