Clodagh Finn: The politics of handbags, with all its glorious baggage

The handbag of Maria Steen, who didn't manage to get enough nominations to run for the presidency, reminds Clodagh Finn of the controversial term 'handbagging' that had been used to insult other women in politics

Independent presidential candidate Maria Steen with her husband Neill, and carrying her Hermès handbag, outside Leinster House after she failed to secure the required 20 nominations to run for the presidency. Photo: Leah Farrell/© RollingNews.ie

Ah, politics and handbags. Maria Steen might have failed to get a presidential nomination but she has reminded us how effective that symbol-laden accessory can be as a political weapon (a back-firing one in this case.)

She should have taken her cue from the maestra Margaret Thatcher, a woman who wore hers like a ceremonial staff and once claimed her handbag was the only leak-free place on Downing Street.

The so-called Iron Lady also said this: “Of course, I am obstinate in defending our liberties and our law — that is why I carry a big handbag.”

During her term as Britain’s first female prime minister, from 1979 to 1990, she would famously pluck documents from that big handbag, like a magician taking a rabbit from a hat, and deliver a line from an economic thinker or a philosopher or a former US president to win an argument.

If the Conservative leader used hers to conceal, Maria Steen was attempting to use her (possibly five-figure) Hermès to reveal. In this case, it was the "hypocrisy" of the left who, she said: “Don’t love the poor; they just hate the rich”.

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“Nobody would ever question a man about the price of his car or of his suit — or if he’s wearing an expensive watch — but a woman carries an expensive handbag, and that’s all the news,” she said in an interview in the Irish Times.

Nicolas Sarkozy

But that’s not quite true. The cut of a man’s suit or the brand of his watch can make just as many headlines.

Just ask Nicolas Sarkozy, the former French president now in the spotlight after being handed a five-year prison sentence for criminal corruption in a case related to receiving illicit funds from the late Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi.

He must be longing for those innocent days when his Ray-Ban sunglasses and Rolex watches were the focus of attention.

Despite what Maria Steen has said, his expensive taste in restaurants, clothes and accessories not only made the news but generated several explosive headlines.

In 2009, Sarkozy’s advertising guru friend Jacques Séguéla added fuel to the fire when he said people should never reprimand a president for having a Rolex. “Everyone has a Rolex! If by the age of 50 you don’t own a Rolex, you’re a total failure!”

You see, there will be a backlash if you use an expensive brand to poke the proletariat. Our would-be presidential candidate was disingenuous in pretending otherwise, but Maria Steen has given us a welcome reminder of how a woman’s handbag is barnacled with a whole array of semiotic signs and symbols.

Margaret Thatcher

It is probably just a coincidence that she chose the colour blue but it is an unintended echo of the “wretched blue handbag” which terrorised Margaret Thatcher’s Tory cabinet members.

They spoke of dreading the well-crumpled papers she pulled from it to bolster her argument, while others feared what went into it.

“Sometimes highly classified documents would disappear into the handbag and out of the official system,” former Cabinet secretary Robert Armstrong once said.

What Margaret Thatcher did, however, was masterful. She used this most feminine of accessories to show that women could have power in a male-dominated political world.

She wielded it like a prop to announce her considerable presence. It became “the sceptre of her rule”, as her biographer Charles Moore so eloquently put it.

She and her handbag almost became one. As Cabinet minister Nicholas Ridley once remarked: “Why don’t we start [the meeting]? The handbag is here.”

Handbagging

The press talked about ‘handbag’ rather than ‘gunboat’ diplomacy and the term “handbagging” crept into the lexicon.

The Oxford Dictionary described it as a humorous and informal verbal attack and gave Conservative MP Julian Critchley credit for coining it in the 1980s with reference to Margaret Thatcher’s ministerial style in cabinet meetings.

She may not have thought it insulting but the recent bag furore reminded me of the ‘handbagging’ controversy in the Dáil in 1992. 

Former Taoiseach Charles Haughey (left) and  former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher (right) in 1988. File photo: Camera Press

In October of that year, then-transport minister Máire Geoghegan Quinn was accused of “handbagging” the board of Aer Lingus in a row over the Shannon stopover and the financial crisis facing the national airline at the time.

She was having none of it.

Geoghegan Quinn said she found the terminology sexist and an insult to women. If any male member of the House had gone to a State board and expressed their thoughts and the Government’s openly, frankly and bluntly they would be admired for it, she said.

How very well put.

If memory serves, there was a heated to-do in the Dáil and she left, only to tiptoe back into the chamber to pick up a forgotten item — her handbag.

In any event, the House took note. On October 29, 1992, the Ceann Comhairle Sean Treacy deemed the reference to ‘handbagging’, especially when applied to a female member of the House, to be unparliamentary.

Máire Geoghegan Quinn

How good to have an opportunity to recall that incident because Máire Geoghegan Quinn is a person of huge importance in the history of politics in the 20th century, although I am not sure that is acknowledged enough.

She was appointed minister in 1977, the first female minister since Constance Markievicz was named minister for labour in the first Dáil in 1919. 

You have to read that twice to believe the new Irish state, so proud of its independence and its people, waited five decades before it appointed another female minister.

And what a minister. As justice minister in 1993, Máire Geoghegan Quinn introduced legislation to decriminalise homosexuality despite considerable opposition by those who held power.

In 2018, she told political journalist Harry McGee that decriminalising homosexuality was the thing she was proudest of, as she challenged the forces at work.

“When I went to the party meeting, there was a lot of resistance,” she recalled. “I addressed it and said ‘most people in this room are parents. What would you do if your son came in and said he was gay? Would you tell them to pack the bags and go? You will continue loving them, of course you will'.”

Marriage equality

And there we are back to bags again.

I wonder, in opposing marriage equality, if Maria Steen ever considered the pain and dejection that was a bitter reality for the many who felt they did have to pack their bags (definitely not Hermès) in the oppressive days of the not-so-distant past?

Perhaps she did. And in one way it is a pity not to allow the contents of her bag of tricks to be aired in public during this presidential campaign. 

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For one thing it would throw a hand grenade into a campaign so uninspiring that #SpoilTheVote has sadly become a thing.

Her candidacy might also remind us of the cruelty and the folly of allowing the long arm of the State to reach into the private lives of our citizens.

On second thoughts, perhaps it’s just as well the handbag remains closed for now.