Straw takes the man out of chairman

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In future all government Bills will have to abide by new rules banning "gender stereotyping".

"Chairman" will be replaced by "chair" while "he" and "him" will no longer refer to both men and women. "She" and "her" will be added by clerks drawing up legislation. Mr Straw claimed the 1978 Interpretation Act, which adopted the use of the male pronoun to include both sexes, was outdated and confusing.

In a written statement to MPs, he said: "I have worked with many colleagues in Government to secure agreement that it would be right, where practicable, to avoid this practice in future and, accordingly, Parliamentary Counsel has been asked to adopt gender-neutral drafting."

Future government Bills would therefore use gender-neutral drafting "so far as it is practicable, at no more than a reasonable cost to brevity or intelligibility", he announced.

But former Home Office Minister Ann Widdecombe, MP for Maidstone and the Weald, said: "Jack Straw is a silly ass.

"A chair is a piece of furniture. It is not a person. I am not a chair because no one has ever sat on me.

"All he is doing is distorting the English language and I would have thought he had better things to do."