So we got Theresa May! She wasn't good enough to feature in the foreground of the Conservative campaign; she wasn't good enough to be involved with the manifesto; she wasn't good enough to be part of the negotiating team. But apparently she's good enough to be home secretary.

From a total of 29 attending Cabinet, there will be just four women. (One of them, Sayeeda Warsi, is unpaid, unelected and a "minister without portfolio". She is also the only non-white member of the Cabinet.) It's quite a contrast with Nick Clegg's comments on Tuesday: "I hope this is the start of a new kind of politics I have always believed in. Diverse, plural, where different points of view find a way to work together".

This Cabinet, diverse? With less than 14 per cent women? Spain manages 53 per cent, Germany 37 per cent. Plural? With not a single minority ethnic MP? A new kind of politics? When two thirds of the top table went to private school three each to Eton and Westminster compared with seven per cent of the population?

If this is the new government's definition of diversity, perhaps someone can explain to the charmed double act of David Cameron and Nick Clegg what the rest of the country looks like. It's not their fault that these 43-year-old white ex-public schoolboys have piles of cash and nuclear families. But they need to realise that they, and their Cabinet, are anything but reflective of the country.

If they care at all about representation and I'd have thought that Cameron must, since in 2008 he promised in the Observer that he would give a third of the jobs in his first government to women then the new Cabinet is an embarrassment to both of them.

How did this happen? Until now the Tories have been impressive; it is largely down to them that the presence of women in parliament increased at this election, from 19.5 per cent to 22 per cent. They also dramatically improved the number of their ethnic minority MPs. The Lib Dems, by contrast, have an appalling record: a 100 per cent all-white parliamentary party with just seven female MPs and even fewer female candidates than at the last two elections. All the women in the Cabinet are Tories; if you're going to have a Lib Dem "who he?" with David Laws, why not a "who she?" with Lynne Featherstone?

Low point

The new appointments cap an election that has surely marked a nadir for women in modern public life. The lack of women in the campaign was much discussed with no discernible response from any party. There were no women promoting manifestos, making speeches, representing their parties in the media. There were few women on TV at all, as Nick Robinson and Adam Boulton tried to out-macho each other with testosterone-fuelled aggression. Pundits were white men to a man — the sight of Lib Dem Olly Grender on Newsnight was almost shocking: women exist!

The Labour party, which has by far the best record on the representation of women, nevertheless hid them away: Harriet Harman, now its second female "acting" leader, was barely seen; nor Yvette Cooper pressed by Jeremy Paxman about the content of her "pillow talk" with husband Ed Balls and now asked repeatedly if her hubby is standing for leader; nor Margaret Hodge, who made the best speech of election night in Barking.

Does representation matter? Is it any better to have May as home secretary when she's voted against gay rights and women's access to abortion? It surely counts for something. May, who once wore a T-shirt bearing the slogan "This is what a feminist looks like" has campaigned against sexual violence and worked hard on getting more Tory women MPs, is far more likely to ask questions about how a policy will impact on women than her male colleagues. Whether or not you like her answer is another matter, but she knows to ask. For an institution to be democratic it has to be "of the people".

And so a stranded quartet carries the torch for women in a scandalously undiverse Cabinet, almost a century after women got the vote. We have a parliament that is not representative of the people, and a Cabinet not even representative of parliament. A cabal of rich, white, middle-aged, soft-handed men is to rule over this mixed-up, multiracial, aging, 51 per cent-female, gloriously diverse country of ours. A new politics? I don't think so.

Katharine Viner is deputy editor of The Guardian.