Rachel Reeves has ordered the removal of all pictures of men from the lavish state room at 11, Downing Street.
The Chancellor announced that every painting in the room would be replaced by artworks of or by women in order to celebrate ‘amazing women who have gone before us’.
The decision comes just weeks after Sir Keir removed the portrait of Margaret Thatcher from her former study in neighbouring No 10 after reportedly finding the image of Britain’s first female prime minister ‘unsettling’.
Ms Reeves told an all-female reception at No 11 this week: ‘This is King James behind me, but next week the artwork in this room is going to change.
‘Every picture in this room is either going to be of a woman or by a woman – and we’re also going to have a statue in this room of (suffragist) Millicent Fawcett, who did so much for the rights of women.’
King James II, who is posing in a suit of armour, is likely to be relegated to a storage room. Most other paintings around the large room currently feature men.
A Tory source dismissed the plan as ‘pathetic gesture politics’.
But Ms Reeves, who is the UK’s first female chancellor, has made the promotion of women a central theme of her political career.
Last year she published a book on obscure female economists, but later had to apologise after it emerged that parts of it had been plagiarised from other sources, including Wikipedia.
She is reported to have been cheered at the reception on Wednesday evening when she boasted of ‘smashing the glass ceiling’ at the Treasury and vowed to end the gender pay gap.
She told the gathering: ‘It’s 54 years now since Barbara Castle that legislation on equal pay and yet there is still a 14 per cent gap between what men and women are paid. I want to be the chancellor who closes that gap once and for all.’
However, she has failed in her bid to remove the urinal from the Chancellor’s office bathroom at the Treasury after being warned it would require listed building consent and cost thousands.
