In this case I cannot help feeling that a better choice could have been made. The case for more women in politics is, in my view, weakened not strenghtened by women who fail to live up to expectations when they are given an important position.

I read in an Open Europe bulletin the following quotes from the Daily Telegraph. ‘Lady Ashton has been absent from 40% of the 42 meetings of the commission ‘college’ in the past year……….In an additional 26% of meetings, Lady Ashton left proceedings early………Her attendance is the worst of the EU’s commissioners’.

This is clearly not good enough. She has not blazed a trail for women. She has let down the UK, the Labour Party and women.

She is from Lancashire, my own home county and she has not done anything to enhance its reputation for hard work. This is the country which by its enterprise, initiative, inventiveness, resourcefulness and hard work propelled the world into the industrial age; a county which is looked at by admiring Yorkshire folk from on top of the Pennines, as they wonder at its glories, while wishing that ‘Our Gracie’ was ‘Their Gracie’. Well they can laugh at Lancashire now. Say what you will about John Prescott, he worked harder than this Lancashire Lass.

What on earth does she do woth her time? What is she doing while the tax payers who foot the bill for her are hard at work? I imagine that mornings in the Ashton household are are pretty quiet, with the maid cleaning the house quietly, so as not to disturb the sleeping Baroness, before she takes up her Ladyship’s breakfast tray sometime in the early afternoon.