The Trusty Servant

SEX DISCRIMINATION LITIGATION

Am I alone if thinking Miss Wimmer’s suit is bizarre? I noticed it in yesterday’s Metro, but failed to keep a copy. The Metro, previously the market leader in the free newspaper market in London, is suffering now that the Standard is free and wisely merged with London Lite in July. However, it has the advantage of taking its content from the Mail, which carries the story.

Poor Miss Wimmer (29) has worked for Mr Lowe, an entrepreneurial type in the City who has got rich raising money for hedge funds, for five years, being paid a total of nearly £600k. He does not appear to have propositioned her except on one occasion when he tried to kiss her, but she was regularly obliged to watch whilst he brought models (with advanced degrees) or hookers to board meetings in hot pants, paid lap dancers at night clubs (who even broke the no touching rule by rubbing their breasts in his face) and indulged in similar distasteful behaviour. Oh, and she also claims that on one occasion he commented that he could not believe there was a “nigger in the White House”. It all got so distressing that she felt she felt suicidal and needed to spend six weeks in “private psychiatric care” at £10,000/week. On her return to the office she was sacked.

She is now claiming £4 million.

I have no difficulty in upholding ordinary employment legislation. If she was sacked without proper compensation or without proper grounds, then no doubt some compensation is due. Perhaps a substantial fraction of her salary, which is presumably more than £10,000/month.

I also deplore the kind of behaviour which she claims Mr Lowe indulged in, but I find it extremely hard to see how the harm it caused Miss Wimmer merits £40,000 compensation, let alone millions. I would even be fairly sceptical about reimbursing her £60k of psychiatric costs, at least without some explanation of why the normally excellent NHS facilities were inadequate.

The City still seems to have substantial prejudice against women, in the sense of excluding them from the top-paying jobs, and paying them less than men doing comparable jobs. No doubt litigation helps change, but this kind of litigation seems likely to substantially harm women’s prospects in the City.

The difficulty is that discrimination is hard to prove. In the early days of the legislation, employers were often careless in their discrimination. An interviewer would take one look at a woman and say, “We don’t employ women”. Now they have learnt to be more careful and to pay lip service to the rules. Attitudes take time to change. This case does not help.

BROWN’S HANDWRITTEN LETTER

Jacqui Janes has been busy working a stunt to embarrass Gordon Brown. Her son Jamie was killed whilst serving with the army in Afghanistan. Mr Brown wrote her a handwritten letter of condolence. She promptly released it to the Sun on the basis that it was deeply insulting because it contained spelling mistakes. The Sun has helpfully ringed them and removed her address.

Brown then made the mistake of phoning her. The call went on for 13 minutes. She taped it and has been busy trying to persuade the television channels to broadcast it.

I think we should pull out of Afghanistan as soon as possible, preferably tomorrow. The war has not been as damaging as our adventure in Iraq, but it has the same characteristic of not advancing UK interests in any way, indeed of harming them.

I also think the spending priorities within the overall MoD budget have been unfortunate. Why on earth, for example, do we need Trident? Or the Eurofighter? Getting any kind of sense into MoD spending is notoriously difficult. There are no doubt good reasons for maintaining separate Army, Navy and Air Force services, but one consequence is a misallocation of resources, because each has a strong Whitehall lobby determined to preserve its pet projects without regard to the wider interest. As far as I remember, the last minister with a serious interest and knowledge of the military who endeavoured to have a proper spending review was Alan Clark (son of Kenneth Clark, the art historian, better known for his scandalous diaries) and he got nowhere.

But the government has rightly caught a good deal of flak for failure to supply relatively small things. Footage of a tank commander in Iraq phoning a UK supplier direct to pay on their own credit cards for some small but critical spare part to be couriered over does not inspire confidence.

Having said all that, I have little sympathy with Jacqui Janes. Brown almost certainly thought that a handwritten letter would be cherished, because it would mean that he had written it personally rather than scribbled a quick signature on a letter someone else had drafted and typed. But no, Mrs Janes bitches about typos. Anyway most of them look like bad handwriting/abbreviations rather than typos to me.

Channel 4 interviewed a variety of people about it (must have been short of news last night). Several thought that Brown should have taken more time to get the letter exactly right, maybe rewritten it a few times. Do any of these people have any idea what a prime minister’s diary looks like. Finding a spare, untimetabled 5 minutes is tough.

Also much of the complaining about equipment is misplaced. It is reminiscent of the complaints about the NHS. At any given moment, there is always more expensive equipment you could buy that would make things a little better. That is why it is a complete mug’s game currying political favour by spending money on the NHS. After noticing for a month or two that things have improved, everyone starts complaining about all the further improvements they desperately need. The fact is her son joined the Army knowing that he might have to fight and die. Certainly it is unfortunate that he did not exactly die for his country, since the war is unnecessary and we should not be fighting it. But these things happen. That is part of what you sign up to when you join the Army.