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Antonia Romeo is expected to become the first female cabinet secretary shortly, an appointment that is “controversial”, according to conservative commentators, since the mandarin is the “queen of woke”. But how did she come by that title? What are her woke credentials – and how did she rise to preeminence?
The civil service itself often sets off the woke tripwire, owing to workplace conventions such as respecting people’s pronouns and having sick leave. Often it’s even less specific, a vague but fiery opposition confected by someone who is anti-woke. So Jacob Rees-Mogg might take issue with the civil service allowing home working, and it will be a classic battle against woke (similar to Nigel Farage lumping in council employees who work from home with those working on DEI or climate). If you were asked to explain verbally why commuting to an office is conservative and working from home is liberal, you’d struggle: but nobody has to, because anti-woke warriors fight under the banner of common sense, which doesn’t have to show its workings.
It wouldn’t be logical, however, to say Romeo was a controversially woke choice just because she was a civil servant; by that rationale, any cabinet secretary would be controversial. There are certainly conservatives who think so. One is named Liz Truss, who recently said on her YouTube channel that if there were a new series of Yes Minister, Humphrey Appleby would be a radicalised trans activist. To unpick that remark, as an analysis of the wokeness of the civil service, would take a while. But that isn’t the mainstream rightwing view on the civil service, yet.
Romeo, furthermore, has held a high rank in every government since David Cameron’s. Was Cameron woke? You might say so, because of the huskies, and a remark he made (this is going back a bit) about wanting his party to be more Polly Toynbee. As for those who kept Romeo on after Cameron, Theresa May was woke because she sometimes spoke thoughtfully about mental health. After that, it changes. Boris Johnson was anti-woke before the word even existed. Rishi Sunak spent 2023 waging a war on woke. No self-respecting queen of woke would have worked under these people, unless as a double agent.
Maybe it would help to nail down what “woke” means. It’s well known that it was coined by African American civil rights activists in the 1930s, and that “stay woke” meant stay aware of racial prejudice and structural racist discrimination. When it expanded to encompass other prejudices in the 2010s, you could have argued, and some did, that there was a fine line between co-opting vocabulary as an act of intersectional solidarity and purloining a word in a way that made it less useful.
But there’s no point relitigating that, because the word no longer means “having an awareness of structural oppression, both of oneself and of others, with a mind to rooting it out at source and creating a fairer and better society”. Now, as the case of Romeo illustrates, it can mean anything: it can mean you’re a civil servant or a woman, or a police officer or a teacher or an HR person, or a parking attendant or the king (although the king would never be called king of woke – he is somewhat a woke king because he believes in the climate crisis).
The definition has no hard edges. It can be something you are or something you think, and it doesn’t even have to be about a person – it can be a membership organisation (the National Trust) or a set of institutions (the law courts). Applied to disability, it is particularly dismaying and all-encompassing, since if you have a disability and want not to be oppressed, that makes you superwoke, but all institutions and processes that accommodate you – whether that’s a local authority giving you a special educational needs (SEN) certificate, or the Department for Work and Pensions paying personal independence payment (Pip) – then become woke. The only way to be disabled and not to be considered woke would be if you embarked on a permanent campaign against your own rights.
Gen Z, which seems to have a much more reflexive understanding of when a term is being strategically overdeployed, call everything woke as a way to neutralise the word altogether. Activities considered woke in my house include, but are not limited to: eating Weetabix without milk; revising in pyjamas; washing.
Ultimately, wokeness is a label you can only avoid being applied to you by actively fighting it – by being anti-woke. It wouldn’t even be enough to simply say “I’m not woke”, because you’re leaving the door open. You cannot spectate the war on woke; you have to go over the top.
The vagueness, the contradictions, the tautologies, the breadth, the hyperbole, the multipurpose uselessness of this word are all part of the point. It builds the concept as a spectre, you cannot grasp it or pin it down. It cannot be vanquished because, meaning a different thing in every context, every mouth, it can endlessly regenerate. It has to be fought because it corrodes everything about your nation and its story. But you must also accept that this is a forever war.
It’s still not clear how the future cabinet secretary got to be queen of woke. I thought there’d be some kind of application process.
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Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
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