On June 5 at a drinks party in an elegant penthouse overlooking the Thames, David Cameron – recently voted a Tatler-magazine party person of the year (as in smart invitations received rather than speeches made) – found himself surrounded by adoring women. At a fundraiser in aid of the campaigning group Women2Win, over 200 of them had paid £40 to meet the leader who has been enjoying the most lavish honeymoon since Burton and Taylor’s, on whom they are pinning their hopes not just of a Conservative victory, but a political career in a party made shinier, nicer, more feminine.
The flat belonged to the Tory grandee Sir Paul Judge, willingly lent for the evening for the party’s new top cause; among the ranks of soignée businesswomen eager to shake Cameron’s hand were Dawn Gibbins, 2003 Veuve Clicquot Businesswoman of the Year, Glenda Stone of Aurora, which helps companies market themselves to women, and Gita Patel, who runs the Trapezia fund for businesswomen, together with glamour in the fashionable form of American Vogue’s Plum Sykes, an old friend of Cameron’s.
The entrepreneur Rachel Elnaugh from the BBC’s Dragon’s Den was bowled over by Dave, as his followers call him. He arrived in a white open-necked shirt – he was heading to a black-tie dinner afterwards – steered through the throng by Anne Jenkin, dynamic wife of the deputy chairman Bernard and founder of Women2Win, which mentors and guides women wanting to be Tory candidates. He talked off the cuff about how these women counted, were indeed the future, of a great party waiting
for a face-lift and a whole new lease of life. “He tried to meet us all, but it was like David Beckham walking into a room,” says Elnaugh, the founder of Red Letter Days. “There was a crush around him. When he got up to speak, the electricity was bristling.” She pauses: “The magic is working, he is handsome, and a celebrity, and that’s right for the age we live in. Why not? As I left, I had no doubt he’d be the next prime minister.” Thomas Strathclyde, the Tory leader in the Lords, later observed with wry amusement that the woman standing next to him was literally quivering with excitement. And his enemies seem to have noted the frisson: Labour’s chairman, Hazel Blears, describes him publicly as an “attractive proposition”, not to be underestimated, which sounds like a warning to the girls.
Also sipping white wine and hopefulness that evening was a 42-year-old black teacher from Bexley, Jacqueline Campbell, and her dreadlocked boyfriend. Hardly a standard-issue Tory woman, she was raised in a Labour family in north London and works in an inner-city school, but has recently been drawn to the message of a white Etonian with cut-glass vowels who, it has been latterly discovered, is related to the Queen. “He’s so charismatic,” she told me.
“I believe in him, that he wants to lead real change. I used to see the Tories as male, white, middle class. It put me off. He made the difference.” Quite how the quintessentially white, male, middle-class Cameron has pulled off that seduction is harder to fathom.
Has he been studying the master of personal soft-sell? Cameron jokily refers to himself as “heir of Blair”, and the similarities are striking, especially in the latter’s early years of leadership, when youthful and unravaged by opprobrium, he was the nappy-changing, nice-guy leader with whom everyone wanted to drink chardonnay under a Cool Britannia banner, who promised to modernise his party. The two men share an easy self-confidence, public-school manners, durable optimism, but women are even more important for Cameron than they were for Blair, whose party was already committed to levelling the playing field, and whose female allies – not least his wife – were feminists, unimpeded by the Tory women’s disdain for positive discrimination or any special favours.
The advancement of women, who make up a pathetic 9% of Cameron’s parliamentary party (17 out of 198 MPs), is the central theme of both his rhetoric and his masterplan. He must win back the women voters the Tories lost in 1997 – the difference between power and exile – and offer a more representative party. To this end, he has endorsed (though did not personally originate) the A-list of over 100 centrally preferred “priority” candidates for target seats, of which over 50% are women. So far, nine have been selected by local constituency parties fiercely resistant to any attempt to parachute in a metropolitan elite over local loyalists. On July 14, the A-list star Harriet Baldwin was disappointed to be passed over by Folkestone and Hythe’s selectors for 32-year-old Damian Collins. Two days later, however, she won Worcestershire West, and two fellow A-list women also won. But it’s early days, and Women2Win events are increasingly sellouts. If the Conservative Women’s Organisation (backbone of the traditional party) runs talks on guide dogs for the blind, Anne Jenkin’s lot are selling the hope of a new era, one in which old Etonians of the famed “Notting Hill set” can find common cause with working-class black women whose grandparents remember the slum tenements in that now gentrified part of west London.
And women are important to Cameron in another way: it seems to be his hope that the privileges of background and income that make the Tories too grand for many tastes might be downplayed by a more universal lifestyle agenda, based on women’s concerns. This has been his main contribution to political debate since his election as leader last December. Slow to attach himself to anything resembling policy (give or take a planned Human Rights Bill), the gaps have been effectively plugged by a flow of warm, family-centred suggestions.
At a similar stage in the leadership, Blair was deep in the painful business of revising a socialist party on centrist lines. The changes he was party to – the demise of the union block vote, and of Clause Four – were monumental; and Cameron has no equivalent battlegrounds on which to prove his mettle. What he has instead is the appeal of an innovator in an organisation that isn’t actually forging ahead at all, but merely playing catch-up with its opponents.
Forget GDP and nuclear armaments: Cameron’s signature issue thus far has been work-life balance, statements and speeches on how it behoves men to be present at the birth of their children, how we need more real-life supernannies; on the importance of paternity leave (which he took, at least partly, when his third child, Arthur, was born in February) and against the misogynist violence of “gangsta rap” lyrics; on the need for childcare that permits choice; maybe allowing stay-at-home mothers to transfer their tax allowances to working partners; maybe allowing childcare vouchers to be used to pay family members. Nothing firm as yet, but all “worth looking at”. And overarching all these are his rather endearing if conveniently vague preferences, concern for the “wellbeing” of the nation, its happiness, its time for family.
If Cherie Blair was the figurehead of the career women, Samantha Cameron’s glamorous but part-time post as creative director of the up-market stationery company Smythson is a softer, more desirable and indeed more contemporary take on the working mother, should, of course, one be able to afford it.
Her husband’s empathy with the domestic agenda, his “feminisation” of Conservative language, serves to make a rather conventional upper-middle-class young man look progressive. “He is the first Conservative leader to truly understand the electoral importance of talking to women in their language,” says Eleanor Laing, his shadow minister for women and equality, who, as the divorced mother of a five-year-old, is relieved that her leader understands the struggle to juggle work and children.
