Dave’s problem with women

BY THE standards of the Conservative Party, October 7th was a good day for women. In his second ministerial reshuffle, David Cameron increased the number in his coalition government by four. He also made a couple of groundbreaking hires: sending Nicky Morgan to the Treasury, where there was no woman minister, and making Anna Soubry the first female defence minister. Yet this progress was a good deal less than the Tory prime minister once promised.

Before coming to power in 2010 Mr Cameron vowed, in effect, to emulate the feminist revolution wrought by the Labour Party a decade earlier. The Tories had only 17 women MPs at the time, while Labour had 98. Not coincidentally, women voters had largely deserted the Tories. For a small minority, perhaps their maleness was the problem. But most sensed that the party was out of touch with modern society and its sex imbalance was one of many indicators of this. The Tories were also considered hostile to gays, blacks, gypsies and foreigners. They had become viewed, in the words of Theresa May, one of their few prominent women MPs, as the “nasty party”. Pushing for more women was an obvious way of improving this reputation: it was shrewdly self-interested, as well as just.