That’s all baloney. We need more women MPs because, by and large, they’re more fun, more human, than male MPs. Scratch a woman MP and generally you’ll find a personality underneath. Scratch a woman MP and she might well throw caution to the wind and scratch you back.

“Go on, tell me please . . . what did she say about me?” The Conservative candidate for Guildford, Anne Milton, is leaning across the pub table, hand on my arm, imploring. She wants to know what her Liberal Democrat rival, Sue Doughty, said to me an hour or so earlier. She really, really wants to know.

“She said you were a bit of a minger, mutton dressed as lamb frankly, and not up to the job.”

There’s a squeal of outrage and then a guffaw. “He’s joking,” she laughs to her two Tory boy henchmen, watching uncomfortably across unsipped cups of coffee. “Isn’t he?” she adds, uncertainly, to me.

“Yes, I’m joking,” I admit, “except about the last bit. She really did say that.”

She shakes her head in disbelief. Earlier Milton had confessed that some people thought she dressed a bit like Doughty. “But I don’t,” she insisted quickly. “She’s rather . . . dowdy, don’t you think?” In Guildford, where the three main parties are represented by women, there’s not much in the way of consensual politics going on. Instead, there’s a hell of a lot of scratching. It’s a Tory-Lib Dem marginal and the top two candidates don’t get along. Believe me, these babes hate each other.

“Have you seen the website?” Doughty, who is defending the seat, had asked me gleefully over a plate of pâté in the bland corporate dining area of the nearby Holiday Inn.

Yes, I’ve seen it. Doughty is referring to a local blogger’s site entitled Anne Milton: Nurse, Mother, Dipstick. An entire website dedicated to trashing — with spite, nastiness and some acuity — Milton’s campaign to return Guildford to the Tory embrace which, these past four years apart, has held it tight for most of a century.

Not the most cruel allegation on the site is that Milton resembles the popular entertainer Julian Clary. Worse, it is revealed that almost all of the local people photographed in Tory leaflets praising Milton are, actually, Conservative activists.

“The picture of ‘Andrew from Christchurch’, for example, is in fact Andrew from Christchurch, the Tory deputy leader of the council,” says Doughty, smothering a snigger.

And the blogger has reproduced fairly risible leaflet pictures of Milton “taking action on the environment” (picking up some litter), “taking action on families” (talking to a lady with a pushchair), “taking action on immigration” (hitting a black person with a claw hammer).

Actually, I made the last one up. There are no black people in Guildford, or almost none.

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