Here’s something for Polly Toynbee to ponder on. It’s a startling fact that if women had never had the vote Britain would have had a continuous Labour government since 1945. Whenever the Conservatives have won an election the women’s vote has been crucial. At the last election 38 per cent of women voted for Tony Blair, while only 32 per cent voted Conservative. Small wonder that in the ensuing Conservative leadership contest, both candidates put the women’s vote near the top of their shopping lists.
In the three Thatcher election victories the Conservatives won more than 44 per cent of the women’s vote and if David Cameron is to win he needs to achieve a similar figure. In this increasingly presidential age, his softer approach will be judged against the aggression of Gordon Brown.
Women do not like great clunking fists. They don’t like the confrontational approach adopted by Gordon Brown. A small minority find his smouldering personality quite attractive but for the most part they look at Gordon Brown and are turned off. A Tory MP’s wife said to me that when Brown was pictured on budget day holding his wife Sarah’s hand it looked as if it was the first time he had done it.
David Cameron, by contrast, looks totally at ease in his family environment. The Webcameron pictures of him doing the washing up, with his kids and his wife give an impression of a man to whom his family, not politics, is the be all and end all.
Of course appearance isn’t everything, but on substance Cameron scores with women too. He’s delivered on his pledge to select more women candidates. The Conservative Womens’ Organisation is now more likely to be found huddled in policy meetings with Shadow Cabinet members than making jam for the bring and buy. The establishment of Women to Win, the Women’s Policy Group and the Conservative Muslim Women’s Group are clear signs that the Tory party is changing.
Cameron is promoting family friendly policies, talking about work-life balances and putting childcare and care for the elderly at the top of his agenda. And women are beginning to sit up and take notice. If you don’t believe me, count up the number of features in women’s magazines on David Cameron. In fifteen months he has outscored his three predecessors added together.
Women like the fact that David Cameron and his family are proud to use the NHS. They relate to his experience of sleeping on the floor of his young son Ivan’s hospital bedroom. His experiences are their experiences. For the first time the Conservatives are more trusted on the NHS than Labour, and the polls show that it’s largely due to female voters.
Conservative strategists have also been taking lessons from George W Bush and the US Republicans on how to win back the women’s vote. A high level deputation visited Washington last year. They discovered that Bush had won in 2000 by highlighting security as an issue with which to target women voters. Women rate security more highly than men as an issue. They want to feel secure in their family, in their home and in their community. This is one of the few areas where Labour still marginally outscores the Conservatives in the polls and is one which the Cameron team knows needs addressing.
There is another factor involved in explaining the way some women vote, but before I tell you what it is let me batten down the hatches to protect myself from the Guardian reading feminist hordes that will now inevitably descend on me. Polly Toynbee, if you’re reading, look away now.
Few non political women judge a male politician purely by what he says. They judge him on the way he looks, sounds and appears on TV. Put crudely they ask themselves consciously, or unconsciously, if he has got the ‘shagability’ factor. In an unguarded moment, my sister Sheena told me that she and her friends sometimes play a game called “if you had to, would you?” Simon Cowell or Dale Winton was one unfortunate choice they recently gave themselves. This week I asked her to put another option to her friends – Tony Blair, Gordon Brown or David Cameron. Out of an admittedly small sample of 40 Essex girls, 33 opted to lie back and think of England with David Cameron, three with Tony Blair and a resounding zero for Gordon Brown. Four were unable to decide because they hadn’t heard of any of them!
This is hardly the stuff of a great academic thesis, but it’s relevant than that. It’s not a theory. It’s the reality. Younger women like David Cameron in a way that they couldn’t relate to William Hague, Iain Duncan Smith or Michael Howard. For older women it’s the same. Cameron is the young man next door, the kind of man they would like their daughters to marry.
In short, Cameron’s got charisma. Tony Blair has it, Bill Clinton has it, but Gordon Brown hasn’t. That is a large part of the reason why David Cameron beats Brown in head to head opinion polls and is on course to beat him at a general election. The women’s vote will determine whether he does it or not.
