Gaby Hinsliff
The joke is almost as old as the prime minister’s Westminster career, coined first in the late 1990s by fellow frontbenchers scornful of her seeming inability to give a straight answer to a straight question. Her behaviour then was read not just as timidity, but vacuity; proof, especially for male colleagues resentful of her unusually rapid rise to the shadow cabinet, that she was just another token woman promoted out of her depth.