Fifty to sixty Tory MPs would be women if David Cameron secures Commons majority

An analysis by ConservativeHome of those adopted as Tory candidates for the next General Election says that there would likely be fifty to sixty women Tory MPs if the Conservative Party formed a majority after the next General Election.

There are currently just 17 Conservative female MPs.

Although the Tory leadership has failed to deliver their ideal aim of half of Tory candidates being women there has been significant progress with women doing relatively better in the most winnable seats.

Although, for example, only 31% of all adopted candidates are women, 46% of the candidates (11) adopted for the 24 seats with notional Tory majorities are women.

The ratio deteriorates thereafter.  35% of candidates selected for the top twenty target seats are women but just 28% for the top 75 target seats.

Women most likely to be Tory MPs after the next General Election include Karen Bradley (Staffordshire Moorlands), Harriett Baldwin (West Worcestershire), Andrea Leadsom (South Northamptonshire) and Penny Mordaunt (Portsmouth North).

On current selections, half a dozen candidates from ethnic minorities are likely to enter Parliament as Tories - joining Adam Afriyie and Shailesh Vara.

Priti Patel (Witham) and Rehman Chishti (Gillingham and Rainham) are the two "BME" candidates in the group of notionally Conservative seats.  Three BMEs have so far been selected for the top 75 seats: Wilfred Emmanuel-Jones (Chippenham), Zahid Iqbal (Bradford West) and Paul Uppal (Wolverhampton SW).  Six BMEs so far selected for top 150 seats: including Alok Sharma (Reading West), Mark Clarke (Tooting) and Shaun Bailey (Hammersmith).  The party also has hopes that Tony Lit may join the green benches as the unlikely new Tory MP for Ealing Southall after next Thursday.

ConservativeHome Comment: "Although David Cameron's A-list alienated many Conservative activists it has undoubtedly contributed to a significant increase in the number of women who would sit as MPs on the benches of a Tory government.  Many come from conventional Conservative backgrounds, however.  Most of the women selected appear to come from the law or the City.  Few have public or voluntary sector backgrounds.  The party has also yet to address the issues of financial exclusion.  The £41,000 average cost of becoming a Tory MP at the last General Election may deter excellent candidates with modest backgrounds from becoming an MP."

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Women candidates in notionally Conservative seats

• There are 26 notionally Conservative seats that needed candidates, 24 of which have selected.
• 11 out of 24 (46%) are women, 4 of whom are in the top 10.
• The average Conservative majority for those that have male candidates is 4496, and in the 11 seats where there is a female candidate the average majority is 2419.

Women candidates in top target seats

• There are 3 women in the top 10 target seats (30%), 7 women in the top 20 targets (35%), and 8 women in the top 30 target seats (27%). Out of the top 75 target seats that have so far selected candidates 15 out of 57 (28%) are women, and women account for 11 out of the 35 (24%) selected candidates in seats between 75 and 150 in the target list.
• The average majority-to-overcome of the top-placed 10 women is 1186, compared with 577 for men
• The average majority-to-overcome of the top-placed 20 women is 2255, compared with 1073 for men
• The average majority-to-overcome of the top-placed 30 women is 3585, compared with 1500 for men

Ethnic minorities

• Priti Patel is one of two "BME" candidates for notionally Conservative seats - the other being Rehman Chishti
• Three BMEs so far selected for top 75 seats, Wilfred Emmanuel-Jones, Zahid Iqbal, and Paul Uppal
• Six BMEs so far selected for top 150 seats, including Alok Sharma, Mark Clarke and Shaun Bailey
• Inclusive of Priti Patel's notionally conservative seat, the average majority for the 7 BME candidates, is 2123.  The average majority, excluding Priti Patel, of target seats with BME candidates, is 3651.
• Deborah Thomas has also been selected, but Twickenham isn't in the top 150

A big thank you to Rory Malone for helping us with all the number-crunching needed for this analysis . We couldn't have done it without his compilation of election data from UK Polling Report and candidate data from ConservativeHome. 

Comments

[601]

Would you include Jewish people as ethnic minority?

[Felicity Mountjoy]

Given that ConHome has been such a critic of the Alist it is remarkable that this is the place where progress in selecting women candidates is being highlighted. Noone can ignore the real feminisation of the party that David Cameron has achieved.

[Nick]

"Few have public or voluntary sector backgrounds"

And why on earth would we want more MPs from the public sector? The Labour Benches are already stuffed with them, and look what it has produced - a patronising, nannying, inefficient Government that always assumes the State knows best. Just like the attitude of many parts of the public sector!

[Ash Faulkner]

I don't care how many women, I don't care how many men. All I care about is that they are the best.

[Henry Mayhew - ukipper / authentic conservative]

A diversion of energy from developing policies. What about tough stuff like Welfare, crime, pensions? Anyone can be cool spending their time quotarising the H of C.

[Angelo Basu]

Nick- aren't there any conservative public sector workers or is the public sector full of Spartist co-ordinators of diversity?

If we are serious about returning power to local people and decentralising things I would expect that we would benefit from having Conservative MPs who understand both the failures of Labour at the delivery end and have worked on Conservative responses to those failures.

Are you really saying that we don't want teachers, nurses, doctors, social workers etc joining the party, voting for the party and becoming MPs?

[michael]

This is great progress. But I would like to see the new Chair of the Party focus now on developing regional lists for local candidates.

The problem at the moment is that seats viewed as unwinnable are not allowed to select their candidates early enough and usually end up with someone who isn't local and wanting only to 'cut their teeth' before moving onto a more winnable seat.

A regional list could operate alongside a national list, allowing seats with big Labour or Liberal majorities to select a local person early, who could work at the seat and nurse it over 1,2,3, or 4 elections, building up the Tory vote.

[Edward]

I find the reference to "BMEs" a little offensive.

[Josh]

Why does the party that produced the first woman prime minister have to worry so much about appearing sexist?

Surely the messianic status Mrs Thatcher has among the Tory faithful shows that being a woman is not a barrier to succeeding in the party.

[Peter]

"I find the reference to "BMEs" a little offensive."
Why?

[Hail to the Thief]

Editor and Rory - Any chance of putting together some stats for how many local v. non-local candidates have been selected in the different types of seat divisions classified above?

[Tim Worrall]

Hey, I'm a Conservative public sector worker! We're not all liberal, do-gooder, beardy why-do-we-need-an-army types. Not all.

[Evan Price]

I think that this is good news ... it demonstrates a significant shift from the dark days of a Windsor selection not so long ago. We should celebrate this ... but not too much!

[Londoner]

I rather agree with Nick at 10:13, although I might not have put it quite so sweepingly, when he said "And why on earth would we want more MPs from the public sector? The Labour Benches are already stuffed with them, and look what it has produced...etc"

After 11 to 13 years Labour Government by the next election, with hardly a private sector Minister in sight, we will need a period of strong antidote. When the Labour Party benches are full of business people, we may be able to afford to discriminate against them on our side. As a man in the private sector (albeit fortunately for me not ever going to be seeking a seat), I can absolutely accept that the proponderance of men over women needed to be addressed and there has been some tifting of the playing field (in other words indirect (at least) discrimination) to deal with this. Ditto ethnic minorities.

But if I were a female Asian barrister or businesswoman, I would be mighty brassed off if the Party then told me that it was also going to discriminate in favour of public sector workers over me. C'mon, there is only so much provovation that those of us who bear the burden of this bloated public sector can take!

So I hate this "there are women but because they are Oxbridge/public school/City/Lawyers/businesswomen, they don't count". In fact it is precisely because these women may come from the same sort of backgrounds as many of the men that people will soon forget that gender was once an issue. If you landed up with lots of public sector women to go with the present private sector men, you would risk creating the feeling that these new women are something alien to what we are used to and that whilst good men create the wealth to finance the public sector, good women can only bring experience of how to spend the private sector generated tax revenues.

The fact is that whilst there are many Conservatives working in the public sector (and it they get selected on merit as MPs fine), those of a Conservative frame of mind are bound to gravitate more towards the private sector and those not, not. Once there, their underlying political attitudes are likely to be further embedded (give or take the current fashion for political cross-dressing).

[Realist]

"Fifty to sixty Tory MPs would be women if David Cameron secures Commons majority"

So it's a shame there won't be 50 to 60 Tory women MPs after the next election then. Any leader who lets Boris the Oaf have a serious position in the party will not be winning an election.

[Robert Waller]

You appear still to be using Anthony Wells's notional results; according to the Colin Rallings/Michael Thrasher figures, which are endorsed by all the major news media, and will be used as the basis of 'official' calculations of swing, Gillingham and Rainham is not a "Conservative-held" seat, but in fact still has a "Labour majority" - of 15 votes, which makes it technically the No.1 Conservative target in the country!
Of course all these notionals are estimates of what would have happened in 2005, and in this case simply means it would have been a very close seat. But I think you should use Rallings/Thrasher in future to avoid confusion, and that's not just because they're in the latest edition of my Almanac of British Politics! Anthony Wells himself said, i think, that his figures were a stopgap until R & T appeared - and terrific work Anthony did too, to make them available so quickly and free of charge.

[Jane Collins]

There's also a related question surrounding gay candidates and openly gay MPs. The three openly gay Tories currently in the Commons (Messrs Duncan, Barker and Herbert) could easily be joined by six or seven others. See this website for an interesting listing.

[Edward]

To reply to Peter, who's been pursuing me on my blog, here's the somewhat tedious answer I've posted there:

"It strikes me as a little divisive to use a candidate's ethnicity not as an adjective (one which I don't think is actually of any relevance to do the job - although it is heartening as evidence of the declining discrimination which characterised earlier times) but as a noun. To do so hints at candidates with ethnic minority heritage as being not first and foremost people but rather another group, distinct from the rest of society.

I also have some residual irritation at the creep of fairly mindless acronyms...but I wouldn't characterise that as in any way offensive!

If the term is going to be used in place of real words, then at least it should be used, as it was elsewhere in the article, to refer to "BME candidates". Would you dream of referring to the number of "blacks" selected or the number of "minority ethnics" selected? I rather suspect you'd use them adjectivally: "black candidates", "candidates from ethnic minorities". The same should be done with the acronym."

[Anon]

Black, woman etc etc doesn't matter at all. What matters is how good they are and what they believe. Whether they turn up in a skirt or a turban is facile. What matters is what they think on key issues.

A more interesting break down would be where the candidates in target seats are in terms of their politics.

[lady anon]

This is super news, we need to diversify in any way we can.

Now all we need is to make sure that we get some female MEPs to Europe and start really representing the electorate.

Unfortunately change is sometimes difficult to take especially when it involves women, its time for a change in the UK and the new face of the Conservative Party is proving we are the ones to make this change.

[Charles Hollingsworth]

What's a BME?

[asquith]

black and minority ethnic