Letter to the Independent: No big hitters for this job, please

10.33.00am GMT Tue 10th Nov 2009

You report (9 November) that Gordon Brown's sales pitch for Tony Blair as the EU council president is that Europe needs a "big hitter". This macho and sexist language tells us a lot about why Labour has lost support, particularly among women.

I would like the former Irish President and UN human rights chief Mary Robinson to get the job. She is not only a big talent with a track record of high achievement, but as a person of stature, judgement, integrity, personal modesty and attachment to law and fundamental rights she is everything Tony Blair is not.

But the fact that no one would think of attaching the label "big hitter" to her shows just how crass and irrelevant to our real leadership needs No 10 and its spin-doctors are.

Yours sincerely,

Baroness Sarah Ludford MEP

(Published in The Independent on 10 November 2009.)