Clever women must be mad to seek power in this country

True, Brown is no Adonis. Those who say he has let himself go terribly, are harsh but probably right. To see him last week, sitting stodgily alongside a limber Barack Obama, was to accept that the Prime Minister no longer resembles the potent visionary so many commentators hosanna'd into office less than 12 months ago. But is the paunchy ditherer we see today really as repulsive as all that? Should we not remember that just a year ago, we thought him the 98th sexiest man in the world? His teeth are still white. Compare them with Jack Straw's. It all could be so much worse.

The positive aspects of Brown's appearance, which also include a fine head of hair and both legs, will, admittedly, rank lower for some voters than his stewardship of the economy. Yet it seems unfair to deny him, at this delicate stage in his career, the kind of scrupulous physical examination that would certainly, were he a female politician, feature in any thorough assessment of her achievements.

Imagine, for instance, any serious consideration of Hillary Clinton's career that ignored her recent makeover or, in this country, a review of Jacqui Smith's progress that glossed over the vital contribution of her cleavage in the current debate about extending detention times for terrorist suspects. If, as some suggest, that is entirely Ms Smith's fault for not taking steps to remove or conceal her breasts, more efficient carapaces have not prevented her colleagues, including Ruth Kelly and Patricia Hewitt, being rated by media experts for both style (zero) and shaggability (ditto). Only last week, noting the shameful standard of our women ministers in comparison with foreign politicians such as French justice hottie Rachida Dati, one tabloid concluded: 'They wouldn't be most men's first choice with all those stunning women in parliaments across Europe.'

It seems curious, when you consider the impact of such things on a career, that supporters of the world's 98th sexiest man (2007) have been so slow to advertise his own, stunning physical superiority over France's tiny bling-fancier and the Italian sleazebag Berlusconi.

At home, again, they neglect to emphasise that the alleged rivals for Brown's job are, to a man, significantly uglier than the incumbent. Even a makeover on the total Anne Robinson scale might fail to place Miliband within the world's 30 billion sexiest. As for Balls, the prime contender: for all that he matches Brown for bulk and aggression, he lacks that crumple-faced vulnerability which, I'm told, will always make the Prime Minister preferable to more self-assured politicians, such as the vain, ceaselessly preening Blair.

It would assist analysis if potential candidates would take some of their clothes off, in the helpful manner of Rachida Dati, but it is perhaps in the public's interest, not to mention those of efficiency, and of Westminster's legions of ill-favoured men, that this kind of lingering physical inspection should remain firmly focused on women. The steeply declining quality of our politicians suggests that this is no time to frighten off sensitive male candidates, particularly when Westminster is already so suspicious of individuals who are not, as the local patois has it, 'heavy hitters' or 'big beasts', or capable, like Nick Clegg, of mating with 30 women.

On its own, the focus on women's appearance cannot, of course, account for that most dreary of British political phenomena, their underrepresentation, which has been exposed yet again by the new Spanish Prime Minister's creation of a predominantly female cabinet, featuring nine women out of 17. It cannot be because they are too ugly. Even women MPs who would meet Berlusconi's exacting standards still fail to make it into the British cabinet.

There must be other reasons why Brown, the great progressive, is content with six women out of 23 and Cameron, the nursing mothers' pin-up, with seven out of 30. From the latter's perspective, the ratio could, I suppose, resemble the status quo. Compared to the all-male Bullingdon Club, where the Tory leader and his colleagues George Osborne and Boris Johnson spent so many hours in the Eighties, it is positively progressive. Dangerously so, when you consider how timid some of these women MPs will be when it comes to the debaggings and vomitings and trashings which are sure to be a feature, next general election, of the Tory cabinet's victory celebrations, if they are not an expression of its grief.

The Labour cabinet's decision to exempt itself from best diversity practice is less easily explained. Once we have eliminated as impossible the notion that Brown, or Blair before him, is in a sneakier way every bit as hostile to a 'too pink' cabinet as Berlusconi, we are forced through a process of Holmesian reasoning to the humbling conclusion that the Labour party's women are less victims of its Neanderthal culture than of their own, lamentable uselessness.

Consider that just six out of 96 Labour women in Parliament have been identified as equals to Des Browne. Though it could be that their very mediocrity is a consequence of the proliferation of Des Brownes in Westminster, which ensures that most ambitious, yet rational women want nothing to do with the place.

Even in Spain, however, discrimination does not fall mainly upon the plain. Female members of Zapatero's cabinet have already been depicted, by one of many critics, as a 'battalion of inexperienced seamstresses'. Experienced or not, the impact on Spain's identity of so many seamstresses, one of whom is both pregnant and defence minister, is all the more fascinating in the light of a new report on the effect of testosterone on male behaviour. Researchers concluded that City traders are martyrs to their hormones, powered to take risks by testosterone spikes to which they then become addicted, creating yet more testosterone; then plunged, after the effects of too much recklessness, into the state of 'learned helplessness' that is brought on by a rush of cortisol.

Since women are less vulnerable to both testosterone and episodes of over-excitement than young men, the authors of this study proposed that banks may want to employ more women and older men on their trading floors.

Given that we still live with the consequences of the risks taken by the gang of hopeless testosterone addicts who constituted Blair's sofa cabinet, it is plain that Gordon Brown, once he has recovered from his current cortisol high, must nip this problem in the bud. In the interests of their country, his more hormonally active male ministers, from Ed Balls to James Purnell and Andy Burnham, the much advertised 'young ones' of the last reshuffle, would surely respond to a request that they undergo castration, once they have completed their families. And if that seems a lot to ask, one can only point out that they would certainly find the only other option for cabinet testosterone control even more painful. Involving, as it inevitably would, the introduction of senior women.