WOMEN make up more than a third of David Cameron’s first batch of new Conservative candidates chosen under his party’s “Big Swingers” strategy.

Seven of the 19 hopefuls selected to fight the most winnable seats for the Tories are women and most of them just missed out on Westminster in the 2005 election, The Times has learnt. They were selected at such an early stage in the electoral cycle — another election is not expected until 2009 — after an analysis of new MPs who won with the biggest swings at the 2005 poll.

The so-called Big Swingers analysis showed that candidates selected 50 months in advance gained 1.65 points on their swing at the last election compared with those arriving 20 months or less before the vote. Candidates who stayed on after losing in 2001 to fight in 2005 were “rewarded for their tenacity” by enhanced swings of up to 2.1 points, the analysis showed.

In line with the findings by Grant Shapps, the party’s new vice-chairman responsible for campaigning, the first 19 candidates chosen under Mr Cameron are almost all seasoned campaigners who narrowly missed out in 2005.

The first 19 will be expected to campaign hard on local issues in tactics borrowed from Liberal Democrat by-election victories over the Tories. But they are also modelled on successful campaigns, such as those run by Mr Shapps in Welwyn Hatfield, where he unseated a former Labour minister on an 8.1 per cent swing.

Mr Shapps, 37, who ran a printing company before becoming an MP, believes that the Big Swingers handbook he has drawn up will help the party to get the extra boost it needs to win at the next election. He said that a Conservative victory would need a general 5.5 per cent swing, equating to a lead in opinion polls of 10 or 11 points. But with 17 Labour seats having majorities of 750 or less, he believes that the Tories could target seats to win a majority on a much lower national swing.

He admitted that his tactics owed a lot to lessons learnt from Liberal Democrat campaigning. Mr Shapps first fought an election against Simon Hughes, the Lib Dem MP for Bermondsey. “We have never gone out and campaigned like this across the country before,” he said.

“It slots right into the new David Cameron Conservative Party, this idea of being much more community-based, working for people, empathising with people. One of the keys to getting big swings is to give voters candidates who are really embedded in their communities. They have to prove they have worked for their communities.”

The addition of all seven female MPs would massively increase the proportion of women on Conservative benches. The Tories had 13 women MPs in 1932 and have just four more now. Only six of the candidates in the Tories’ top 50 target seats in the 2005 election were women.

Tessa Jowell, the Culture Secretary, told the Labour spring conference in Blackpool that the party aimed to use allwomen shortlists to increase its target for women MPs at the next election to 40 per cent. The party, which has 98 women MPs, would need 44 more to meet its new aim.

TORY BABES

Caroline Nokes (Romsey) needs 0.2 per cent swing

Penny Mordaunt (Portsmouth North) 3 per cent swing

Maggie Throup (Solihull) 0.5 per cent swing

Lorraine Fullbrook (South Ribble) 4.6 per cent swing

Karen Lumley (Redditch) 6.7 per cent swing

Nicky Morgan (Loughborough) 4.3 per cent swing

Deirdre Alden (Birmingham Edgbaston) 6.2 per cent

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