Nearly three years ago the Conservative Party hosted a summer fundraising ball complete with Eastern European models in skimpy swimming costumes and young waitresses in hotpants and bras. The after-dinner auctioneer hailed one bidder as “the woman with an almost perfect bosom”. The guest of honour was David Cameron. It was an embarrassing rebuff to Mr Cameron’s attempts to rid his party of its chauvinistic image.

The sight of the Conservative leader surrounded by men at the weekend’s spring conference will not do much more for him. “Tragically at the moment if you say anything about the Conservative Party and women, the only name [the public] can name is Ann Widdecombe,” one prominent Conservative, who has fought hard to get more women selected into winnable seats, said yesterday. It is fair to say that the ladies in Mr Cameron’s Shadow team have failed to shine, but then so have many of Labour’s. It is just that Labour has so many more of them. Mr Cameron has managed to squeeze a barely creditable seven women into lowly positions in his Shadow Cabinet, alongside 25 men.

What of the fêted “Alist”, the cadre of hand-picked candidates who were to transform the face of local party selection meetings, easing more women and black and ethnic minority candidates into winnable seats? It was scrapped after local activists objected to what they saw as the imposition of well-groomed candidates from London. Nonetheless, there has been limited success. If the Conservatives have a majority of one after the next election, they expect 50 of their 324 MPs to be women. If, that is, the candidates can cling on that long: one activist warned last night that some of the women selected are having financial problems and may not make it to the next election.

Mr Cameron can hardly afford to lose any. First, because the numbers are pathetic already. Second, because he made the extraordinary promise last year that one in three ministers would be women by the end of his first government. It is not at all clear where they are all going to come from.

“I would like us to be doing very much better but you have got to be taking the constituency with you or you lose all your activists,” one campaigner said. “It is the same with black and ethnic minority candidates. If you have only got constituencies, which we do, which are predominantly middle-class white – well, you have to take them out of their comfort zone.” The Tory party is still in its white, male comfort zone and that, in the end, is what that photograph represents.

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