Everybody agrees that the appointment of Ruth Kelly, the brainbox, to head up the big- spending education department is a good thing. But no one really expects that Ruth Kelly, the woman, will make much difference to New Labour's prospectus.
It is one of the paradoxes of New Labour that we don't know whether she will bring her own experience of the personal and the political to her portfolio. That is because the party that has brought more women to the House of Commons than ever before has also successfully subdued them.
That is not to say that the women are ineffective - research by Fiona McTaggart and Anna Eagle, both assiduous feminist MPs, has shown that the women in the Commons are diligent, but that they don't have an organisation to co-ordinate their voice.
Women MPs themselves believe that 'Blair's Babes' - a term they hate - have been important, by their very presence, in muting the overtly sexist tone and culture of the Commons.
But New Labour was the beneficiary of all those women, it was not their benefactor. It was not so much New Labour that brought in the unprecedented cohort of women, but an earlier feminist movement in the old Labour Party that challenged and changed its selection priorities.
Women MPs backed New Labour because they believed it would release them from the macho manners of old Labour. But New Labour assumes that all sensible people speak with one voice, and that voice is enunciated by the beau Blair.
It was once believed - wrongly - that because Blair smiled a lot he must be nice, and he'd be nice to women and children.
Everybody now knows that he is interested in neither. But the women in the Commons have been obliged to follow His Master's Voice. Their power is dissembled, and insofar as they wield influence, it is by smoke signals, words in ears and hushed conversations behind the scenes.
The political scientist Joni Lovenduski comments that most women MPs see themselves as feminists, but the Commons is a masculinised place 'and under Blair it is excessively so'.
Ruth Kelly's dilemma is not really so difficult, however: If she wants to come to the aid of her ailing party she must give it the voice of the people it doesn't understand: women and children.
