The painful irrelevance of Anneliese Dodds

That shattering event on Friday last week has upended everything we thought we knew. People rushed to their phones as it happened, furiously texting friends in disbelief at the unbelievable news. Suddenly, the world looked a very different, far scarier place. Yes, It was incredible, but it really did happen. Anneliese Dodds resigned as UK international-development minister and minister for women and equalities.

In this hour of amazement mixed with confusion and helpless anger, as we rend our garments and wail, ‘Why? Why?’, to an unhearing God, there is no room for flippancy. There can be no space for cruel jokes about Dodds’s resemblance to characters from Fraggle Rock, Craggy Island, The Riddlers or The Borrowers. Or to abandoned mops. Or maids hurrying by with stacks of dirty plates in historical TV dramas. We are above all that here. Let us just wish Ms Dodds well, and hope that, relieved of her onerous duties as minister in charge of chucking other people’s cash away, she can enjoy the opportunity to spend more time in her Fimble Valley constituency.

Right, that’s enough of that. Let us consider Anneliese Dodds properly. Whenever she popped up in the media sphere, I was reminded of the immortal words of the late, great Big Brother contestant, Nikki Grahame, and found myself repeating them: ‘Who is she? Who is she? Where did they find her?’

Dodds was obviously well out of her depth as a frontline politician. Plenty are, to be fair. But that doesn’t convey the enormity of her insignificance.

Resignation letters can be quite juicy. Usually, one sees a thumbnail appear on X and can’t wait to click through for a good giggle and gossip. But in Dodds’s, the many paragraphs of tiny crabbed print elicited tired eyes. I clicked and was nodding off by the second paragraph. I was going to quote a bit here, but I daren’t. Let’s just say a course in the art of précis would not go amiss.

Okay, if I must. The most interesting sentence, I kid you not, is: ‘I also regret deeply that I will no longer be able to work with you towards a more equal Britain.’ How can a human being put her name to that and sleep at night? An AI would blush.

How will Dodds be remembered? Perhaps as the shadow chancellor from whom Rachel Reeves was a step up? This was an achievement of a kind, as it was the only time the entrance of Reeves has elicited a sigh of relief rather than a sigh of resignation.

Really it was Dodds’s position on women that will go down in the history books, to be brought out from their dusty pages when people in the 24th century fancy a laugh at our times. This was the shadow spokeswoman for women and then women’s minister who didn’t know (or pretended she didn’t know) what a woman actually is. When asked how to define a woman on Woman’s Hour in 2022 – on International Women’s Day! – Dodds went into a flat spin:

‘Well, I have to say that there are different definitions legally around what a woman actually is. I mean, you look at the definition within the Equality Act, and I think it just says someone who is adult and female, I think, but then doesn’t say how you define either of those things. I mean obviously, that’s when you’ve got the biological definition, legal definition, all kinds of things… I think it does depend what the context is, surely. I mean surely that is important here.’

And that’s the most coherent bit. What’s a woman? It depends on the context.

Why stop there? Let’s have a transport minister who thinks a kettle could very well be a car, in the right context. Or how about an energy secretary who thinks plentiful cheap power for the National Grid could be provided, in the right context, by milling breadcrumbs and butterbeans? (Actually, nobody suggest that in front of Ed Miliband, even for a laugh.)

You can guess the rest of Dodds’s opinions and statements on every issue, as they are utterly boilerplate progressive-activist rubbish. Her resignation because of foreign-aid cuts to international development, to pay for a pittance of an increase in defence spending, is being spun by some as a matter of honour and principle. Certain other events that happened around the time of her resignation made her claim that this would ‘deeply harm the UK’s reputation’ seem even more deluded and irrelevant.

Dodds belongs to a world of yesterday that is, for better or worse, likely gone forever. A bit like Fraggle Rock.

Gareth Roberts is a screenwriter and novelist, best known for his work on Doctor Who.