A SMALL but revolutionary, and unremarked upon, thing happened to the Tory party after the 2005 general election. Or rather, it happened to the Conservative Parliamentary Wives Club. It renamed itself the Other Half Club. For years, husbands of the few female Conservative MPs had objected to being referred to as wives and some called it the Conservative Parliamentary Spouses Club. But when Nick Herbert was elected in Arundel & South Downs last May they had to have another rethink, so that his boyfriend Jason could be included as well. And the Other Half Club was born.

As anyone watching the stylish parade of ladies going in to cross-examine the Conservative leadership contenders this week will have seen, the “Tory wife” is changing.

Spare a thought this weekend for Samantha Cameron, 34, the wife of David. The life of an MP’s wife is tough — and that is even before your husband runs for the Tory leadership and open season is declared on his and your past, your family and friends.

For Mrs Cameron, life is extraordinarily complicated already, with a severely disabled three-year-old son, Ivan, who has cerebral palsy, a 20-month-old daughter, Nancy, and a third child due in four months.

A pregnancy for Samantha is always particularly stressful because doctors are uncertain whether Ivan’s disability is partly genetic, so a new baby could inherit similar disabilities. Ivan needs 24-hour care; the family gets one night a week from the local authority and has to provide the rest themselves.

The wives of most MPs have to juggle two homes. Sounds great, but not when you have children to shuttle between them. Do you live in the constituency, or London? And where do you send your children to school? In the constituency, where they fall victim to teasing, bullying, even media harassment, or in London — and then face criticism that you are not living in the constituency?

Anne Jenkin decided, when her husband, Bernard, was elected in 1992, that “I wasn’t going to leave him on his own in Westminster. I knew what a dangerous place it was. There are plenty of temptations.”

But even she, who had worked in and around the House of Commons for 16 years by then, felt isolated at first. “It is very, very easy to feel very left out of his life. I remember him coming back all exhausted and saying, oh I forgot to tell you I went to No 10.”

Mrs Jenkin resolved it by working as her husband’s secretary, something a lot of wives do, but then people accuse them of doing it only to keep the parliamentary secretarial allowance in the family. “You can do the diary; put in the kids’ nativity service and sports day immediately.”

Another said: “When your husband becomes a Tory MP you don’t see him at all. I’m going to have to start doing deals with his secretary to try and get her to block out some family time.” Having a parent who is an MP can be tough on kids. “All I care about,” said Mrs Jenkin, “is getting out the other side in one piece as a family unit without our children in rehab or prison.” A bit depressing, surely? “You get through it by enjoying it,” she said. “You meet some fantastically interesting people and go to some fantastically interesting places, and you also do some pretty dreary things, but it’s a pair of scales. You’ ve got to be as individual as you can, not mind being on your own and not moan about how your week’s been when they get back knackered on a Friday night.”

Most of the traditional arrangements to support MPs’ wives assume either that they do not work, or that they will work for their husbands. There is limited travel allowance, for instance, for a family to travel to London. And many local activists still expect them to stay at home and make small talk.

• “They are not actually interested in national politics,” said an old hand. “They are interested in whether you think you might be living in their village or the neighbouring village; or whether you think their pub is nicer than the other one.”

  The new generation of Tory wives is turning its back on all this. “When your husband’s elected they arrange drinks for all the new spouses and a lady with quite stiff hair comes up and asks if you want to become a member of a Tory wives’ club,” said one (sorry, most do not like being named), “and I don’t know anyone who has done so.

  “Look at Samantha,” she added. “She’s a director of Smythsons. You can’t expect wives in high-powered jobs to behave like 1950s housewives, because they will go mad.”

  When Damian Green was first elected in 1997, his wife, Alicia Collinson, a barrister, remembers being given a brochure called Two for the Price of One. “It gave some very good advice, which I didn’t think was very helpful for me. It was mainly for those who were not working and would be in the constituency the whole time and be a surrogate for their husband.” Ms Collinson has produced her own pamphlet, Politicians Plus, updating the advice for modern working spouses. “People see those wonderful pictures of party conferences in 1960s, 1970s, all the women wearing their flowery hats, and they think we’re all the same. Of course we’re not.”

• I found Sir Malcolm Rifkind in jovial form this week, having just stood down from the Tory leadership contest. He recalled his wife, Edith, being rung up by a journalist when he was an Edinburgh MP and asked whether she was in favour of changing MPs’ hours to a more reasonable 9-5. “No I’m not,” she said. “You forget he is 400 miles away. I want him tied to the House of Commons; the last thing I want is for him to be liberated in the evenings.”

• There was a debate this week in Westminster Hall, the MPs’ sparsely attended second debating chamber, about whether it should be compulsory for children’s theme parks to have first aid available for customers.

  You assumed it was already? So did I, and so did the parents of Megan Wilcox, 7, who died a year ago after tripping on a mat or colliding with a child — it still isn’t clear which — at the bottom of a slide at a pleasure park called Wonderland.

  Megan’s mother, Kerry, and stepfather, Wayne, are campaigning, with the help of their MP, Graham Allen, to make the provision of first aid compulsory, although they admit that it would not necessarily have saved Megan. Kerry is angry that ministers rejected the plea this week and says that she will keep fighting.

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