Don Valley MP Nick Fletcher has a point, men's health needs to be addressed - Jayne Dowle

‘What’s new?’, you might ask. Despite the selection of three female Prime Ministers to date, which is three more than Labour has ever managed, isn’t the Conservative party known for being a boys’ club?

Under David Cameron and later Boris Johnson as PM, didn’t almost any House of Commons debate or parliamentary questions turn into a particularly nasty kind of verbal bunfight where women were shouted down, talked over, or patted on the head and patronised with a ‘yes, dear’?

Well, all of that is true, but this is different. At the Conservative Party conference in September Mr Fletcher gave a speech reiterating what he’d already told his bosses earlier this year; he’s calling for a ‘Minister for Men’ to push forward concerns that pertain specifically to the male gender.

Before you roll your eyes in disbelief, consider the bigger picture. Government, clearly rattled by coruscating rows over gender identification, is stepping very carefully in this area.

Liz Truss has abolished the position of Minister for Women, created by Labour PM Tony Blair in his first 1997 government, and first held by Harriet Harman.

She’s gingerly replaced this responsibility with the wider role of Minister for Equalities, which is held by a man, Nadhim Zahawi. In these gender-complex times, that decision might seem to make more sense, but I think it is missing the point that Mr Fletcher is trying to make.

We have to take his determination to get men’s issues, problems and challenges to Cabinet level seriously. If your first thought - as mine was - is that men certainly don’t need any help to take the best-paid jobs, make decisions at board level (according to government figures released last year, less than half - 39.10 per cent - of boardroom positions at FTSE 100 companies are held by women) or commandeer all the space on public transport, you might consider thinking again.

Men are statistically far more likely to die from heart problems, diabetes and cancer, because they either ignore lifestyle factors with an ‘I’m alright Jack’ mentality, or are too afraid to report them until it is too late. Men are more likely to report loneliness than women, and usually die younger; age 79.04 versus 82.86 for their female counterparts.

Men, frankly, are in a mess. And it’s women who are having to pick up the pieces and often, bear the brunt, whether by doing the jobs they don’t feel they can do, raising families alone without a male role model in the home, or worse, taking their partners’ frustrations (literally) on the chin.

“Health issues – the heat, alcohol, smoking, obesity, all these issues do affect men more than they affect women,” said Mr Fletcher in his conference speech. “Why is this happening? Why are men turning to the fridge? Why are men smoking? And I think as a country, as a government, we are continually looking at the cure for something rather than the prevention for it.”

You have to concede that he does make a strong point. And that’s before anyone even mentions mental health. “Abandoned, left behind and forgotten. It is in everybody's interest that we raise our men's aspirations…”, said his parliamentary colleague, MP for Rother Valley, Alex Stafford, speaking in a Commons debate on the subject earlier this year.

This is the extreme end of mental health problems, obviously, but it’s well-known that in most countries of the Western world, men are statistically far more likely to take their own lives than women. Of the 5,583 suicides recorded in England and Wales in 2021, around three-quarters (74 per cent) of these deaths were men. When the nationwide self-help group Andy’s Man Club, which welcomes all men who want to talk about their problems with other men, opened up in Barnsley a year or so ago, it proved so popular a second venue had to be arranged; there are now two groups active in my home town, and many others across Yorkshire. If you’re a woman, whatever you might think about being patronised and man-splained at, you can’t help but be concerned, as presumably, you’re also one of the following too, a daughter, a sister, a mother, a wife, a partner, a grandmother, an aunt.

We live in crazy political times, I know, but who’d have thought that it would take a bunch of male Tory MPs, several from died-in-the-wool and down-to-earth Yorkshire too, to get us talking about it?