We were very disappointed that The Parliamentary Bookshop took our book off its shelves but we have discovered that democracy and free speech is carefully controlled around Westminster Village. When our book came out Shirley Williams was the only female writer featured on their web-site, (80th birthday this summer, national treasure) last week there were no women at all.

Undaunted we undertook signings and knocked on doors and persuaded booksellers to stock our book. What was very shocking was the fact the most booksellers didn’t seem to have a love of books or even of writing, let alone ideas of any kind, books were just another commodity.

Small publishers have huge disadvantage against the big beasts, they can’t pay for books to be reviewed or displayed flat out or for big posters in the windows. When our book came out it was up against Martin Amis’s “The Pregnant Widow” which monopolised the Waterstone’s windows in many branches.

Anyway we drove the length of Kent & Sussex tapping on booksellers’ doors and leaving our product. The worse reception we got was from the booksellers in Rye who could not have been less enthusiastic and clearly regarded Rye literary festival as a damn nuisance and anyway we were too late for it. “The brochure has gone to print”, they said triumphantly.

We did a signing at Hayward’s Heath on a Saturday. On this occasion we encountered a number of people who were clearly being cared for in the community, or not, or should be. Bookshops, those that are left that is, are clearly taking the place of libraries when people need somewhere warm to go. And in bookshops you can chat too. As soon as the customers realised what our book was about they sounded off with total inhibition about the NHS, schools, modern life in general but once they were shriven they didn’t see the need to buy.

Anyway on this one morning we saw that our fears about the country, its shape, its size and general lack of education were more than confirmed. (We have noticed that many women in Sussex who we thought would fall on our book have been astonishingly sniffy about it. They prefer the status quo (while their husbands are in work that is) and are terrified, or perhaps unable, of thinking for themselves or rocking the boat. What cheers their week up is a new scarf or a game of bridge. The politics of self interest is alive and well down here. It is not just men who have failed to take up the challenge of feminism. Women are suspicious too, frightened of what we do and what we are saying. “Would my husband like your book?” said one suspiciously. Sussex Life, their magazine of choice, would give us coverage if only we’d stuck to jam.

There were glimmers of hope though…..a lovely Canadian man, who had inexplicably fetched up in Hayward’s Heath, bought a copy and went away for a coffee. Half an hour later he came back to tell us how much he was enjoying it. And a lady from Battle had driven fifty miles to meet us.

Disappointed and furious about the stance of the Parliamentary Bookshop we decided to sell our book in Westminster ourselves. We set off with deckchairs, books and leaflets. Our day was both cheering and disappointing.

The cheering thing was that in spite of Al Qaida and safety concerns we were allowed to pitch our chairs right outside The House of Commons, in fact we had pole position on the pavement. We were dead opposite a couple of policeman who didn’t even ask to see our trading licence or ask us what we were doing. We weren’t apprehended at all, which was a pity as we were going to tell the authorities that we were part of Cameron’s Big Society and feature on TV news being dragged away. London is more laisse faire than under Labour’s leadership it was beginning to seem.

We had intended to sit in Parliament Square, defiantly opposite The Parliamentary Bookshop but Boris had just cleared the grassy area from protesters and boarded it up. It looked even worse as the protestors were now camped outside the pale more or less on the road so what will happen when they are pushed from there we do not know, except it is bound to be ugly.

Anyway there we were, considered completely normal, so normal that a large Indian family asked to be photographed with us and surrounded our deckchairs with beautiful saris and beaming smiles. Then lots of other tourists asked us to take their photos. Almost everyone that passed wanted to know where the loos were. We didn’t really know the answer to this but waved them in the general direction.

The main trouble was we didn’t sell many books. Certainly not enough to cover our train fare and taxis, (and no, it would have been impossible to cart our sales kit and picnic basket that doubled as a table on the bus).

What was noticeably absent was any interest in ideas or democracy. Almost everyone was at Westminster just to say they had been there. The only punters who were genuinely interested were backpackers who apologetically said they couldn’t buy books as they had no space. Anyway they took our leaflets, although we have no way of knowing whether they stuffed them in the nearest bin…..we weren’t so masochistic as to go and check.

At least we were able to direct them to Amazon. It seems to be flourishing as so many independent bookshops close; although we still love and recommend Daunts in the Fulham Road…..they still have our book in stock!!

In fact I am pretty sure that had Cameron done some of his plain speaking and said he was personally going to get to grips with BT (for example,) however dodgy and undemocratic it might be, he would have had a landslide victory; he wouldn’t have been beetling in and out of back offices brokering deals and wondering what he was going to say to the Queen about forming a government; (he wasn’t completely sure how he was going to do, except that the buck had suddenly stopped with him) even as he was driving into Buckingham Palace.

Back to BT. We had a bad storm here about a week ago. A thunderbolt hit the house, the electrics tripped and all the phones went dead and also the internet.

I ring BT who reassures me in its auto-speak way that my line is working perfectly normally and that if I want to avoid the exorbitant cost of this call, (BT charge for complaining time) I can do it by ringing another more complicated number or on-line. Getting nowhere with the more complicated number and unable to do this on-line as my lines are not working I ask my ex-husband to do this from his base in Singapore, (I bear the cost of this unnecessary call and BT benefits some more). He gets no joy from the internet so repeatedly rings BT to tell them what is what. Following this dialogue they text and leave messages on my mobile to tell me that my line is working perfectly and my problem is nothing to do with them.

Then after my ex bellows down the phone at them, (presumably to someone in a third country, although it could be Singapore where he lives, as BT’s people through no fault of their own have Chinese accents), I receive a text from them to inform me that there is general trouble in the area which is what I know already and is actually what I told them in the first place.

Over the next few days I see BT men all about; down the road, up poles, just about everywhere but at my house. Eventually a man appears at five to eight one morning. I am still in my pyjamas and caught on the hop. I tell him the problem: two phone lines need mending. He says he has only got instructions to mend one and that he can’t look at the other, (even though they come from the same socket) without a job number. He asks where the phones run. I show him the control box in the cellar. He leaves all the lights on and all the doors open and wants a cup of coffee. He asks where the wires go next. I say “How would I know? You are the expert”, and try to put the ball firmly back in his court. He says he thinks the trouble is that I have left one of the phones off the hook. I say “I don’t think it is as simple as that”. He looks fussed and harried and I can see needs to be handled with extreme care.

He finds the problem but says it is nothing to do with BT and caused by my own equipment. “That phone’s no good” he says triumphantly. I resign myself to getting a new phone……but in fact it doesn’t seem to be quite as simple as that he has to fix something, taking wires apart and twiddling them and testing things, and it takes an age, so not totally my equipment then?

Anyway after he has departed I get a phone call from BT to explain that the two feet of cable from outside the house into the conservatory where the fault occurred is unaccountably my problem, and I will be charged £150 for their unnecessary visit.

The telephone on the extension in my office which was working before the man arrived now doesn’t and I still have no internet as although supplied by BT this is another department.

This company needs sorting by a duo with extreme resilience……come back Balls and Brown.

During the days following the election there was a frenetic air in Westminster, the men dashing in and out brokering deals, they might as well have been throwing spears at each other it was so tribal. Thankfully Gordon Brown, (one of the best things he did, possibly the only good thing), drew an end to it by bringing his little boys out of number 10 so everybody could sob thereby forcing Cameron to rush off to the Queen.

It all happened much as we predicted in our book we were gratified to observe. The country in its wisdom, (democracy can be a wonderful thing when it works) gave all parties a bloody nose because it was fed up with the lot of them and furthermore it didn’t want any party to have too much power.

From our point of view the most alarming thing was that women were pretty much kept out of the whole election process. They were not in on the debates, they were not interviewed on TV news, and female candidates weren’t visited by the media. They, like other female opinion formers in this great non-debate were marginalised, in fact pushed out all together yet they seemed not to dare make a fuss, or were told not to. “The powers that be” must have made this jolly clear in the inimitable way that “the powers” have, without actually saying so, or putting anything in writing.

This election was brokered by men, for men. This was men’s business: “women keep out, let us handle this”, was the very strong subtext and this unspoken mantra ran through the whole electoral process like letters in a stick of rock.

Some of the selected commentators, (presumably self-selecting) all men, seemed to dash from one prime time slot to another in a matter of minutes. Ed Balls showed up everywhere as did Andrew Neil and Andrew Rawnsley. They were rolled out time and again to say the same things over and over. There were complaints of course, letters to the Times and so on. The Fawcett Society saw its moment and tried to weigh in, but they, like all other commentators, were ignored. Opinion formers, other than those designated were out. The momentum couldn’t be stopped, not by women; it was a runaway train full of male pundits enjoying their moment. Yee Haa!

TV producers were also criticised but they took no notice. Jon Snow wondered if the interviewers themselves were part of the problem and stupidly asked if it would have helped if he’d worn a dress. Only Jeremy Paxman asked searching questions. He even tried to debate the subject of missing women but he was rapidly moved on. Somebody had shouted BORING in his headpiece.

Unsurprisingly male MPs still massively outnumber women. As the Conservative Party did not achieve a runaway victory, the predicted bunch of Cameron’s Cuties didn’t flood in. Women in the chamber still struggle to be heard. There are only four women in the cabinet, although some, mainly Lib Dems have lesser ministerial posts.

So how are they doing? Well not too badly it seems. The newspapers seem desperate for the coalition to fail but so far Cameron has turned out to be a jolly good leader. He is intelligent, charming and energetic and not afraid to speak his mind. (Some of his advisers have fallen short in their briefings; it wasn’t a great idea to be critical of Pakistan given the devilish uncertainty of the Afghan war, however cleverly it played out in India).

In fact Cameron has proved to be doing pretty well on the world stage; we hope he doesn’t decide to make his name abroad like so many PMs before him, always the easy option. Domestic policy is always harder to grapple with. His new idea, (in fact there is nothing new about it) of targeting welfare benefit fraud may have pushed the buttons of a few stuffed shirts in his own back benches but the greater problem is tax dodgers in general, more particularly those in his own stratum of society. Surely efforts should be made to get people off welfare not punish them for pinching just a bit bigger slice of not a very nice pie?

If only he could sort out the railways…..now that would guarantee him a second term. Or if Nick Clegg could sort them out the coalition could go on forever. Still, I don’t think it will happen, politicians are still foolishly debating a multi-billion pound high speed rail network, which nobody wants; the people would rather have their money spent on more trains (and cleaner) on our local line, but as we observed in our book ministers don’t make their mark with maintenance, they like big projects to help their all important profile-raising.

George Osborne has showed himself more than up to the task of making cuts and insisting they be carried out. As we and Boris Johnson suggested, he is making a good fist of clearing away a lot of the nonsense. We are worried however that his team may not be addressing the number of incompetents deeply imbedded in the civil service, the incompetents who commissioned all the failed computer projects for example and the many disastrous PPP & PFI schemes that cost the tax payers untold millions as well as not working and running over budget.

Can he rootle out these miscreants? (What we do know for certain is that many a manager, and we came up against this fact time and again during our researches)however incompetent, is very practised, in fact downright Machiavellian, at guarding his own territory, watching his own back and blaming the other guy. They are always articulate and seemingly convincing and invariably expensive to get rid of. What we very much do not want to see is these types still in place while librarians and nursery teachers are made redundant and play areas scrapped.

The press hate the idea of a coalition…..particularly a SUCCESSFUL one. It just goes against the grain somehow. Boring, nothing to write about. Commentators warn about double-dips and gloomy economic forecasting; forgetting that it is only the uselessness of 99% of economic forecasters that got the country into the hole it is desperately digging its self out of. Banking? Inflation? Growth rates? Housing Prices? Spoken about with authority? What do experts know? Pah.

Theresa May seems to be doing a job and is more than up to the task of being Home Office Minister, (we admit this even if we don’t personally like her) and Caroline Spelman, although stuck with deeply boring subjects like recycling waste, is obviously working hard.

Health Minister Andrew Lansley isn’t doing too well however. The NHS simply can’t take another reorganisation. This minister should read our Chapter 10 “Tub Thumping” and see there is no point re-organising for the sake of it and dumping more work on GPs. Apart from the out of hours service that they jettisoned and needs firmly putting back in their own court, doctors are working well and should be left alone apart from being encouraged to whistle blow when necessary. Lansley has failed twice already, big time. He has bowed to the food producers and cancelled traffic light schemes for food labelling and refused to raise the price of alcohol because of pressure from the drinks lobby. People will get fatter and drunker. No one trusts him or thinks he is any good and he’s only been doing the job a few weeks.

The way to improve hospitals is to improve the existing management not take work away from them. Perhaps some role play could be devised for them by all the now redundant agencies that used to roll out happiness classes. Turn the managers into patients for a week and see how it is on the other side. Make them wait in their own waiting rooms, or for appointment times, or put them on trolleys in corridors.

Better still put Andrew Lansley on one and keep him there until things get simpler and better.

Michael Gove has got his heart in the right place but has his knickers in a twist. He has some good ideas, well theories at least, but is in a muddle about implementation. The danger with all his schemes is that only the middle classes will benefit from his wonderful plans. He hasn’t yet said what he will do for failing schools apart from cancelling most of their new buildings. And as for his first big idea, (actually originally promulgated under Labour) exactly how many people have the money, time and resources to set up a school on their own? Surely these people already send their children to the private sector, with a lot less bother.

Dear Eric Pickles, we wanted to have a photo of him in our book but somehow he was edited out. Anyway he has stood up for the English counties; now he is a man who truly understands the mood of the nation. We do think he should read our Health & Efficiency chapter however. In his present state he certainly can’t be re-shuffled into Health. Not as a role model although he would do as a terrible warning. And he would have been a certain beneficiary of the abandoned traffic light scheme.

Ken Clarke seems to have put a few stuffed shirts out of joint by registering scepticism about the usual Tory thinking that “prison works”; Iain Duncan Smith is quietly beavering away as before but the Lib Dems seem to be rather quiet. Maybe they are all just getting on with it, (unused to power they have no history of personal “image building” and think they are simply there to do a job of work) which is what the country wants after all. Funnily enough it is the Lib Dems who have provided the little scandals: David Laws’ boyfriend problem and Chris Hulme’s bi-sexual lover. Nothing too much for the tabloids to get their teeth into, but give it time.

Nobody seems fazed by the fact that half the cabinet are Old Etonians, (in spite of indignation whipped up by the press). The fact that our education system has thrown up too few contenders to challenge the Etonian prerogative will have to be revisited in time but right now it is the least of our concerns. Frankly we just want competence, a team who can just do the job without unnecessary fussing and leave us to get on with our own lives, thank you very much.

Dear Jon

In response to your piece on “The missing women” last night……NO it is not enough for you to wear a skirt!!

The media were as much to blame in the “keeping women out” election campaign. The election coverage at Westminster was chalked out by men, ring-fenced by men and orchestrated by men. The same male political commenters rotated in the press and on every TV station.

All sorts of interest groups should have been included in the discussions: charities, representatives from the unions and local government, farmers, teachers etc. and half of these representatives should have been women. Even with letters from women to the Times and The Independent complaining about the bias the editorial and TV producers had in place their neat schedules employing the usual suspects and were loath to respond. (Of course we all know that if they’d taken this clamour seriously, the schedules could have been switched in an instance).

For some reason “outsiders” to Westminster were not considered relevant to this debate, although it is these very “outsiders” who will bear the cuts and whose lives will be impacted upon.

We wrote our book What Are They Doing In There? as a consequence of being kept out of these heavily manned Westminster ramparts, and our investigation was frustrated at every twist and turn. You will see our book was removed from the shelves of The Parliamentary Bookshop. This bookshop has hundreds of of titles by men but only one by a woman, yes ONE, by a women, Shirley Williams, who was also and incidentally a lone voice of sanity during all the testosterone fuelled brouhaha. (It is also worth mentioning that if women had behaved like men in the last few days someone would have “taken us away”).

In our book we say that Channel 4 news deserves more of the licence fee because its journalists are among the very few brave enough to ask difficult questions, but you let us down big-time during the election. My heart sank whenever I saw Andrew Rawnsley being wheeled in again.

Best Wishes, Julia & Hazel

Women tried to have a voice but they were ignored. Hugely, massively, ignored.

Even The Fawcett Society made no impact…..it tried, it wrote to The Times and so on, (although they didn’t reply to us, we are not “experts” or “academics” you see, even though we, owners of resourceful and intelligent female minds, [yes, “outsiders”] got to the essence of the thing in just a few weeks).

Still it’s pretty hard for anyone to disparage our book since we got it so right; all our prognostications have come true. We are not irrelevant after all.

Even in the aftermath of The Election the grand-standing is coming from male politicians and commentators, all men, the same men… the Andrews: (Marr, Neil and Rawnsley) just won’t give any ground. And the language is ratcheted up; from these designated political “officials” the hyperbole increases as less and less happens. Like football commentators they are finding it hard now to fill the gaps and are starting to repeat themselves. If women behaved like this they would be considered hysterical and someone would take them away.

Two cheers for Jeremy Paxman, we know he’s read our book as we caught him quoting from it and he tried very hard to introduce the question of missing women, the BBC even got in Alexandra Shulman to contribute, although she got the wrong end of the stick and said women weren’t an issue (but quite properly said the clothes worn by political wives were an irrelevancy). But then the programme moved speedily on.

Still there is relief for some. Joanne Cash can look forward to the birth of her baby without having to combine it with a maiden speech, Sarah Brown can take time out from her Blackberry and Samantha Cameron can put her feet up and eat honey-cake and stacks of cheese and tomato sandwiches like normal pregnant women.

This is the bottom line though: just 21% of MPs are women and this just ain’t good enough.

It should have been straight forward. We, the people, recognised the national predicament and that what is needed is an emergency government to sort the credit crunch because until that nothing.

Surely partisanship and different viewpoints can be put “on hold” for a couple of years until things looked better?

So far so good. Cameron and Clegg being reasonable people, if left to their own devices could no doubt put a package together without difficulty. But we all know that the back room boys are kicking up. Although unable to plan for any national emergency like the aftermath of war MPs and advisers are suddenly all-seeing and far sighted when it comes to the demise of their own careers.

Those stuffed shirts that had been “preparing for government” are now left apoplectic and floundering. There is much shadow minister reasonableness on TV but in their great offices the opposite is happening. There is gnashing of teeth, stamping of feet and cold fury.

Also, the hippies at Glastonbury didn’t vote out the Tories to get them in again and are well, “very unhappy”.

So the usual stasis, and fear prevails but neither Clegg nor Cameron dare show it. Only George Osborne looks human, and anxious.

We’d like to advise these famous men to go into retreat away from the throng, as recommended in our book, but if the recent past applies, (and this goes back to Trollopian days as we have quietly observed), if they as much as move one millimetre out of line and dare go off-piste, (even though surely this is what Chequers is for?) their desks will be emptied and they’ll be out on the street.

And with a few pot-smokers in his lap, (legalise cannabis and we’ll support you), and a promise for a Referendum on P.R. that he’ll never keep, and improvements in education that will never materialise, Brown will still be there, sitting like a large toad, with poor Sarah still bleakly tweeting beside him.

Which is an example of what happens when good men do nothing and the politics of self-interest prevail.

Cameron and Clegg, Clegg and Cameron… YOU MUST NOT FAIL.

The intention was clear, (clearer than all that blue-sky thinking), the “change” it actually wanted was no one-person and no one-party to have too much power.

We saw all this coming; the hung Parliament, the scrum for the middle ground, the desire for collaboration and consensus; even Caroline Lucas taking Brighton Pavilion for the Greens.

It is all in our book, the whole predictable shebang.

So politicians… and designated media commentators, ignore our words at your peril.

Quartet Books, famous for their cutting edge, up-to-the minute commentary on modern life are now in a quandary. Not wanting our talents to be wasted, in desperation they have decided to set up a small life-style imprint considered more suitable for women in Westminster and have commissioned us to write “101 New Ways with Rhubarb”.

Watch this space for details of others in the series…

It was interesting the debate. Very interesting. The fact that Nick Clegg did so well was not just because he spoke so well, it was because we all wanted him to shine… the population was wishing and hoping… in fact willing him on.

Everybody is hoping against hope for politicians to stop behaving as if it is all a big game and nothing matters more than winning. As we have said in What Are They Doing In There? we want consensus and co-operation for a change; the country is plain fed up of Punch & Judy/push and shove. (And Clegg’s wife Miriam has not trailed around after him like Samantha Cameron or twittered till she’s blue in the face like Sarah Brown. It is all so satisfactory).

Strangely, (well not strangely…..we get to the essence of the thing) the book we quote from profusely is The Prime Minister by Anthony Trollope. This book describes the formation of an emergency coalition government. So also very interesting.

In fact it seems what the people really want, (and perhaps we are wiser than anyone gives us credit for, perhaps the education system hasn’t entirely failed after all, or perhaps it is just native wit), is to select a government from all parties as if it were Fantasy Football. Nobody trusts anyone with too much power. Like muck we want it evenly spread. Vince Cable for Chancellor of course, and perhaps now Nick Clegg for P.M. Who’d have thought it? Would Frank Field, Caroline Lucas, Julia Goldsworthy, Iain Duncan Smith, William Hague and Charles Hendry please also step up to the plate.

Actually we have been a bit mean to Nick Clegg. In What Are They Doing In There? there is a priceless photograph of him talking to a sleeping audience. Sorry Nick, we couldn’t resist it.

The weekend newspapers have tapped into the fact that, like our book, he has the advantage of appealing to the young. And like us he has suddenly come in under the radar.

This is what my daughter’s friend from Cranbrook, Millie Booth-Clibborn, (an A Level Politics student) wrote to her in a text;

HA HA, I’m really enjoying the book, parts of it are absolutely hilarious…..I’ve literally been laughing out loud. Please tell Jules I think it’s brilliant!!

On the dot of 6.30pm friends started streaming in and what was wonderful was the way they kept on coming, on and on in shoals and droves. Over 120, many of them young, pitched up in all to celebrate that endangered species… the book!!

And then Sally Ann arrived with tulips, and then Millie with the cake.

For everyone it was a night to remember…