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Women hold the key to power as Cameron aims for Downing Street
Jo-Anne Nadler is a former Conservative Central Office staffer who is the author of Too Nice To Be A Tory - It's My Party & I'll Cry If I Want To, published by Simon & Schuster in 2004, price £10. CONSERVATIVE leadership elections have become a near biannual ritual of vitriol and back-biting over the past decade.
But this time, things have been different. The commendably open process has made Conservatives interesting again, and the party finds itself poised for a potential comeback under David Cameron.
And that's where the real challenge begins. For more than 10 years, the Tories have been "flatlining" - their support rarely rising above a core of 30 per cent of the vote.
Some groups have all but abandoned the party, not only geographically, with Westminster seats increasingly rare as one heads north, but demographically as well.
The party rates particularly poorly with young people, ethnic groups and women, especially professional women. That it should have lost the woman's vote is especially worrying because, traditionally, a majority of women have voted Tory. That majority was lost in 1997 and the trend has continued.
Given how important the woman's vote has been in the past, it is no exaggeration to say that winning back this support could be the key to General Election success.
In 1979, women were among Margaret Thatcher's greatest supporters. She was a strong role model and long before anyone had dreamt up the phrase, "work-life balance", we could relate to the way she combined a family and home life with a career.
The unfortunate impression of the later Thatcher years, though, was of a harsh and uncaring government.
Add to that the sleaze, economic mismanagement and general ineptitude of John Major's government, and there are many reasons why women, of all ages and backgrounds, will have been turned off the Tories.
Women, too, are generally practical, less interested in the Westminster theatricality of politics, more in getting things done.
As the pin-striped Tory boys tore into each other, apparently obsessing about arcane details of European policy and holy cows of tax cuts, New Labour - shorn of ideological baggage - talked about health and education and looked reasonable, sounded sensible and even rather feminine.
Tony Blair's disingenuous Government has since thrown away much of its advantage with women, but there are few signs that women are turning back to the Tories.
How could a new leader address this? Certainly by attending to the party's policy and presentational weaknesses as outlined above. Attractive, practical policies to deal with everyday issues will go a long way to re-establishing the party's credibility, especially with women. But there is more.
While Conservatives should not be patronising or modish, they shouldn't fear that addressing or even acknowledging a problem with women, amounts to giving in to political correctness.
The party has often looked overwhelmingly male and its tone has seemed chauvinist. That's why David Davis made a mistake posing for those now infamous "DD for me" photos.
Genuinely bemused by the reaction that this caused, Davis compounded his PR problems by telling BBC's Woman's Hour that those of us who hadn't liked it had a sense of humour failure.
What he couldn't see was that such pictures only go to reinforce a widely held suspicion that Tories are sexist. It's just not sensible to draw attention to your weaknesses, and playing the Benny Hill of politics hasn't helped Davis look statesmanlike, let alone comfortable with the idea of women as his equal.
Where macho David Davis may have scored well with women has been in his clear approach to policy. He was spot on in concentrating on the public services.
But, as the contest went on, David Cameron emerged as the more obviously female-friendly candidate. In image terms, he certainly has lots of pluses. Once considered too posh, we've now got to know Cameron as family man with a disabled child who uses the NHS and as a husband of a working wife expecting another child. Theirs is an apparently collegiate marriage to which many of my contemporaries can relate more easily than to that of the Davis's.
This is not just about style. More importantly, Cameron and his team are acting on evidence that shows how badly their party lost trust, particularly with women.
Rather than offering headline-grabbing policies like specific tax cuts, Cameron wants to emphasise that the party will only promise what it can deliver.
This is a more subtle approach and could fail if he does not specify policies in the long term. For now it suggests a more comprehensive assessment of the party's weaknesses.
There is plenty of research to suggest that women like to vote for other women, although I think that policy and tone are probably more important than fielding female candidates for winning back women's votes.
But it's true that too few Conservative women are MPs, and both Davids rightly promised to increase female repre-sentation, though rightly without women-only shortlists. It's a project though which I suspect comes more naturally to Mr Cameron than to Mr Davis.
If the Conservative Party is going to win again, it needs both to be respected and liked. It has to offer a consistent, distinctive and deliverable policy agenda as well as to look and sound like the country it wants to represent.
Given that more than 50 per cent of that country are women, it's increasingly vital that short of having another female leader, the next Tory leader seems comfortable with women, understands their complex lives and can talk to and about them without sounding as though he considers it an add on.
Both Davids have brought important skills to this contest but now it is David Cameron who has the job of making the party female-friendly again.
In doing so, he may just hold the key to Downing Street.
To order a copy of Too Nice To Be A Tory from the Yorkshire Post Bookshop, call free on 0800 0153232. Order on-line at www. yorkshirepostbookshop.co.uk. Postage and packing costs 1.95.
07 December 2005
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