Appearing on Question Time in 2007, Christopher Hitchens was invited to comment on whether Salman Rushdie’s knighthood was “an insult to Muslims everywhere”. His response was unambiguous:

“When the Fatwa was issued against him by a senile theocratic dictator who’d run his own country into beggary and bankruptcy and misery, every Arab and Muslim writer worth the name, from Naguib Mahfouz, the Egyptian Nobel prize winner, to Adunis, the great poet of the Palestinians [sic], all signed and wrote in a book for Salman saying ‘we identify with our cause with you, and with your struggle for free expression in our culture’. If you say that Muslims are being offended by this, and you lump them all together, you immediately grant that they are in fact represented by the most extreme, homicidal, fanatical, illiterate, intolerant people who not only haven’t read this book but couldn’t read it — and that’s an insult to Islam.”

Last week Theresa May, in what the front page of Britain’s most-read newspaper histrionically called the “massacre of the middle-aged men”, reconstituted the cabinet of the UK government to include more women and demographic “minorities”, in order to make it “more like the country it serves”. Her cabinet is so shiny and new that you can see your face in it. Of course those people are still nothing like the country they serve, and that can’t be reduced to their skin colour, or to their genitals, or otherwise to their outward appearance. If the prime minister really wanted her cabinet to be “like” its country then, of its 22 ministers (including herself), eleven of them would have an IQ lower than 100 and four of them would be aged fourteen or younger. Paradoxically, nine of them would be Labour voters. Impossibly, one of them would be unemployed.

Of course the point is not whether the cabinet physically depicts the greater population, but whether it represents its interests. It might be argued that a female minister is more likely to care about, and thus serve, the interests of women more generally. It’s not hard for me to think of white male politicians who wholly fail to speak for me, and we’d be hard-pressed to say that Thatcher was a feminist or that Hitler was uninterested in the advancement of Aryans. The obvious point is that the matter of whether the Conservative cabinet represents you depends on whether you agree with Conservative policies. To tell women that Amber Rudd represents them by virtue of being a woman is to grant that women on the whole are represented by somebody of Amber Rudd’s calibre — and that’s an insult to women.

If May is really concerned that women and people of ethnic minorities have a harder time reaching positions of power then by increasing the number of women in government from 30 to 37, and the number of members of ethnic minorities from four to nine, she has helped twelve people. Such an artificial reshuffle does nothing obvious to address the wider problem, and by defining the viability of politicians in terms of their “race” and sex she has reinforced the toxic rhetoric of identity politics.

For those who dislike the notion of representative democracy this whole question is moot. For the rest of us there’s Edmund Burke, who said “your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion”. If we can grasp this point — that the government exists to lead, not to follow — then we should not be asking for government officials who are just like us, but rather who are better at their job than we would be. May’s attempt at demographic box-ticking deprioritises competence as the main criterion for office, and if it happens that the comparatively diverse new faculty will be more competent that the stuffy, alabaster, ovary-deficient one that preceded it, that will be lucky for us. The concern for us ought to be that this is not what determines the prime minister’s process of selection.

So the new government, Tory as it inexorably is for now, may superficially resemble you except that it’s older and more cynical, it holds a specific worldview that you may not share, and it’s more burdened by the realities of politics. This Wildean parody of the real face of the nation will gather dust like all others — it’s time we asked ourselves what a real portrait of society ought to look like.