What women want

The Tories are desperate to regain the female vote – but they have a very patronising idea of how to do it

You’d never think it to look at them, but the Tory party used, for much of the 20th century, to be the natural party of women. That’s right: women are, contrary to what most feminists like to think, instinctive Tories, if you judge by the voting record since the advent of universal suffrage. Not in recent elections, admittedly, but in general. And women liked David Cameron — until about six months ago, when, judging by the figures, as a sex we started going off him. And that has created something like consternation right at the top of the government.

The alarm first sounded during the spring local elections, when the polling showed that women had cooled towards the Tories even more than men had. This came as a disagreeable shock to the party’s sense of the natural order of things.