What the UK can learn from the Dutch 'vote for a woman' initiative

Call me an obnoxious bigot, but here’s a suggestion. Instead of a queue of mostly male Tory leadership candidates getting their knickers in a twist about who is or isn’t a feminist, how about… electing more women who could take part in the race?

After years of watching politicians dodge balls like female quotas or all-female candidate lists, a grassroots campaign in the Netherlands has come up with a simple idea. Understand your political system and use your vote better.

The Stem op een Vrouw (Vote for a woman) group has been working since 2017 to encourage the country’s 17 million people not just to vote for any old woman. Instead, it suggests ‘hacking’ its preferential voting system, a form of proportional representation where voters choose a candidate from a national list, and those with enough ‘preference’ votes leapfrog their own party’s selection to be first in line for a seat.