The Horsell's Mouth Politics, pedantry and personal interests

Chloe Smith is Tory female MP number 18, but we need more!

While we were selecting Jonathan Lord as our PPC in Woking, there were some misgivings about the at least 50% rule for female candidates, which stated that out of any given shortlist, at least 50% of the candidates had to be female. I may have been about the only person who agreed wholeheartedly with this idea, for reasons I have stated before.

Today, DC announced that the party could move to all-women shortlists for by-elections from 2010 and all I can say before the chorus of tut-tutting is that it’s 15 years too late.

Consider this – in 1931, there were 13 female Conservative MPs. By 1997, the figure had not changed and it currently stands at 18 with the addition of Chloe Smith. This is actually fewer than the 20 in 1992. Yes, the percentage of women MPs is now higher than it has ever been but at nine percent it’s nowhere near good enough.

For 10 years, we have been promising the public that we would do something about this issue. We have failed as a party to do that and if we are to retain any kind of credibility, we need to act. All women shortlists are wholly undesirable. But in the circumstances they are also completely inevitable.

What’s interesting to me is that the image of the Conservative Party as a chauvanistic and male-dominated organisation that excludes women is completely wrong. Women make up a large proportion of members, chairmen and councillors. And it is they, as much as men, who seem unwilling to give their fellow women a chance in the party. But the cause is irrelevant – it is only the end result that the electorate will see.

I totally disagree with Tim Montgomerie on this – his own website has reported recent selections in Sleaford and North Hykeham (Stephen Phillips, who is an excellent candidate and was in the Woking Open Primary), Bracknell (Philip Lee), Macclesfield (David Rutley), Woking (Jonathan Lord) and Skipton and Ripon (Julian Smith). All of them are winnable or safe and all the candidates, selected from at least 50% shortlists, are male.

It’s just not good enough. DC has promised to mend our broken economy, society and country. He’s also promised to get more women into Parliament. If the selection panels refuse to do that and we end up with just 30 female MPs in 2010 out of 375 seats, how on earth are the public supposed to believe anything else that he says?

Associations need to stop banging on about “meritocracy” and conservatism with a small “c” and wake up to the bigger picture. Nine percent.

Update: Happily, I find myself in exalted company with @JoanneCash on ConservativeHome, with whose views I totally and utterly agree. The comments that her article has attracted illustrate some of the problems we face. There is no “meritocracy” in constituencies always selecting white middle-aged men and yes, those same men who have worked hard for the party for many years, do deserve to be placed at the bottom of the list for seats because they have failed to engender urgency on this issue.

The argument about “where does it end?” is pretty superfluous – it ends when the Conservative Party gets dragged into a position where it is seen to decently represent the country it aspires to govern. I’m afraid there are no shades of grey on this one for me.

But let’s not allow it to damage the party – there is so much good stuff for us to fight for together.