The Honourable Lady is Extremely Frustrated

In a government run by the Bullingdon Club and headed by a Regency throwback with a fourteen-year-old sense of humour, there can be few more depressing jobs than that of the little Ministerette for Fillies and Frillies. Fortunately for herself if for nobody else, the present incumbent is Maria Miller, a comfortable combination of coarseness and inanity whose policy as culture secretary is "show us your price tag", and whose peril from excessive sensitivity is most likely minimal. Miller has marked Equal Pay Day with a schoolmistressy harangue to companies which have failed to sign up to a voluntary thingy: "I don't believe government intervention will work," intervened Miller, who is nominally a member of the government. "Legislation alone is simply not enough," Miller lectured, at a Downing Street finger-wag for which there were apparently not enough chairs. Under the present government, in fact, legislation alone is simply not worth bothering with; when improving the behaviour of our corporate fellow-citizens, a voluntary thingy is so much more cozy. There was a section of the Equal Pay Act which would have obliged all companies to report their gender pay gaps, but the coalition did not consider this sufficiently rigorous; instead, Maria Miller's voluntary thingy encourages participating fat cats to publish whatever gender equality data they think fit, which is obviously a much better incentive. Miller has also written to all her Cabinet colleagues ordering them to lead by example; which will doubtless make all the difference.