"If Liz Truss’s car-crash premiership is to be a cautionary tale, let it be one about the dangers of affirmative action."

"Amid all the commentary on [Liz] Truss’s rapid rise and precipitous fall—which one year on blames either her free-market purism or the Whitehall 'Blob,' according to political taste—one key component of her career has been conspicuous by its absence. Truss’s rise coincided with the 'modernisation' era of Conservative leader David Cameron. And because she is a woman, Truss benefitted from preferential treatment within her party and sympathetic treatment in the media, even from traditionally hostile papers, in spite of numerous gaffes and failures. The liberal press may now wax apoplectic about Truss’s uselessness, but it surely protests too much—after all, it did so much to foster the tokenistic political climate that put her there....
    "When David Cameron was elected Conservative leader in 2005, he introduced his 'A-list' as part of an effort to remodel the party along the lines of Tony Blair’s incumbent New Labour and make it less male, pale, and stale. ... After he assumed power as head of a coalition government in 2010, Cameron made Truss a junior minister for education in his 2012 cabinet reshuffle.... the reasoning behind that decision: it was 'clinically designed to neuter claims Downing Street had a "women problem".' New female appointees were duly met with praise in the press, and hailed in the left-wing 'Independent' as 'the rapid rise of Cameron’s new girls.' ...
    "Before his election, Cameron had pledged that a third of his ministers would be women in the next parliament, and he was under pressure to deliver. Accordingly, ... on the morning of the [2014 cabinet] reshuffle, Cameron decided to promote Truss to the cabinet position of environment minister, a decision the former PR man would later describe as 'gut instinct.' 'I looked at people like [Truss and others],' Cameron recalls of the reshuffle in his autobiography, 'and saw the modern, compassionate Conservative Party I had always wanted to build.' ...
    
"Affirmative action is often used to placate media criticism, and politicians may even announce sex- or race-preferential appointments explicitly and be praised for doing so. Lavish praise then follows for the appointee, who is somehow held to have struck a 'historic' blow for representation. But how can box-ticking be considered ground-breaking female advancement? ...
    "The very question of 'women's advancement' requires us to view individual female politicians as representatives of women in general—a supposedly monolithic political category, whose interests are presumed to be the same. In reality, Truss’s rise was good for one woman and one woman only: herself (though the honour of being the UK’s shortest serving prime minister ever is surely a dubious one). To consider Truss’s high-flying a win for women as a whole is to subscribe to a collectivist mindset over a meritocratic one that values individual talent and ability."

~ Laurie Wastell, from his article 'The Disaster Artist: Was Liz Truss Britain’s first affirmative-action prime minister?'