It was not Chloe Smith’s victory speech — impressive though that was — which demonstrated what a cool operator Britain’s newest and youngest MP is going to be. It was how she handled the “champagne test”.
Shortly after the result was announced, the Tory victor in the Norwich North by-election was ambushed by television cameras clutching an expensive-looking bottle of sparkling wine. “Are you going to be drinking that?” she was asked.
A lesser candidate would have “corpsed” as they worried about how to answer what could have been a trick question. Instead, she replied with a winning smile: “Of course. Today is for celebration. But tomorrow we get on with the work.”
It might not quite have matched Margaret Thatcher quoting St Francis of Assisi at the door of No 10, but it was not bad for a 27-year-old, who had become the the star of one of the year’s most important electoral battles.
Smith, a management consultant, theatre buff and self-confessed political obsessive, was selected as the Conservative candidate for Norwich North 18 months ago. At the time no one expected Ian Gibson, the sitting Labour MP, would resign to force a by-election in protest at the way the party leadership had singled him out for punishment in the expenses scandal. Overnight, Smith became the poster girl for David Cameron’s Tories.
Her victory, by a convincing margin of 7,348, was the first sign of success for Cameron’s plans to get more women elected. After the general election she is likely to be joined by dozens more young female Tories. As the men who fell victim to the expenses scandal depart the political scene, the Tory benches are set to be repopulated by talented women in their twenties and thirties.
For the strategists who surround Cameron, it will be the moment when the Tories shed their old image as the “nasty party” and emerge as a political movement which genuinely reflects 21st-century Britain.
Sceptics may point out that the vast majority of candidates in winnable seats are still white males in the traditional mould. They fear the influx of women MPs are doomed to be mere window dressing in a largely male-dominated party.
Smith was born in 1982, the year of Thatcher’s victory in the Falklands war. She was just eight when Britain’s first female prime minister was deposed.
She belongs to an age group which has few hang-ups about glass ceilings or “institutionalised sexism”. Her mentor was Baroness Shephard, the former Tory education secretary, who shares that younger generation’s attitude.
“I never saw what all the fuss was about when the Blair Babes were complaining about things like being pushed against the wall by male whips,” said Shephard. “Had they never realised how crowded the voting lobbies can get?”
Smith took her first tentative steps into politics at the age of 16, when she petitioned Shephard, then her local MP, over the poor state of school transport. “She was most eloquent even then,” recalled Shephard. “She made no secret of the fact she wanted to be an MP.”
After studying at York University, where she gained a first in English, she joined Deloitte as a management consultant. Recently she has been on secondment at Conservative Campaign headquarters.
On Friday Cameron spoke about Labour’s “utterly despicable” campaign in Norwich. He was apparently referring to ministers’ claims about Tory cuts, but rumours about Smith’s sexuality had been whispered by Labour activists during the campaign. The party’s literature repeatedly pointed out how Chris Ostrowski, its candidate, was married and how he “fell in love” in Norwich. For the record Smith was, until recently, in a relationship with a male Tory staffer.
Now she is an MP, her old mentor has a few words of advice. “Chloe will get a lot of attention. She must not be distracted by it,” said Shephard.
Who are the other women on the fast track to the Tory front bench?
Perhaps more than any of them, Margot James symbolises the huge cultural shift that Cameron has engineered within the party.
A self-made millionaire, James is an attractive blonde lesbian — unashamed of her sexuality but frustrated by Westminster’s fascination with it. For a party desperate to prove it has no truck with homophobia, it is a big asset.
James made a fortune setting up a public relations company, which was sold in 2004 for £3m. She could have put her feet up. Instead, she is fighting the marginal constituency of Stourbridge. She is the first to admit she had a privileged upbringing, going to Millfield, the private school, but her political passions have nothing to do with protecting the interests of the wealthy.
Charlotte Leslie, the candidate for Bristol North West, has given up her full-time job and flat in London to spend all her time campaigning in the constituency where she grew up — a significant financial sacrifice. A former Tory staffer in her early thirties, and an ex-boxer, she spent some time at Policy Exchange, Cameron’s favourite think tank.
Another one to watch is Joanne Cash, the candidate for Westminster North. If Cash, a barrister specialising in media law, is elected she will arrive with a contacts book to die for. At her wedding last year to Octavius Black, the founder of the Mind Gym consultancy, Michael Gove, the Tory schools spokesman, gave the main speech.
Other guests included Andy Coulson, Cameron’s director of communications. Cash lives in Notting Hill, west London, yards from the home of George Osborne, the shadow chancellor. As well as being an assiduous social networker, the Oxford-educated Cash is a policy junkie, advising the front bench on legal issues.
When, a little over a year ago, Cameron declared that he wanted a third of his ministers to be women by the end of his first term as prime minister, it prompted howls of dismay from traditionalists. “When I was made a minister, it was presumably because I had convinced somebody somewhere I had earned it,” puffed Ann Widdecombe at the time. Even Cameron’s admirers describe the pledge as “an incredible hostage to fortune”.
“Unless he puts every single female Tory MP, bar the mad, bad and sad, onto the front bench, there is no way he is going to be able to deliver. It’s preposterous,” snorted one sceptical insider. Nevertheless, huge resources have been devoted to ensuring there will be a respectable number of women in Cameron’s government.
According to figures compiled by ConservativeHome, the Tory blog, 13 of the 17 female Tory MPs are seeking re-election; 10 women are standing in notionally “safe” Conservative seats; 31 women are contesting seats which are in the top 116 targets the party needs to win to get a Commons majority; and 18 women are standing in winnable seats.
Jonathan Isaby, co-editor of the website, calculates that this means more than 50 women are likely to be sitting as Tory MPs if Cameron forms a government. The figure could rise to 60 or more, the bigger the swing the party achieves.
If that happens, it will be because of Tory organisations such as Women2Win, a campaign group to elect more Conservative women to parliament. Over pinot grigio and canapés it aims to make breaking into such a male-dominated party less daunting and to ensure female candidates are not relegated to no-hope seats.
How seriously does Cameron really take the issue? One female Tory high-flier said: “If I thought for a moment that it was all a patronising exercise to get more oestrogen on the front benches, I’d be the first to say so. I believe he’s serious about promoting women.”
James thinks it has been very difficult for the tiny band of women Tory MPs to make their mark. She is optimistic that after the election there will be enough to give them more confidence as a group.
“When you’re in a small minority, as the 17 women Tory MPs are now, the reaction is to try to fit in with the norm. I hope after the next election there will be many more of us and that we will be able to behave with more confidence as women. We’ll feel less pressured to fit in. That’s what the public wants — they don’t want apparatchiks,” James said.
Theresa May, Smith’s campaign manager and shadow work and pensions secretary, said the Commons could “look and feel very different” after the next election. “There will be greater emphasis on what I call the new politics. Women politicians are less interested in dirty tricks and backstabbing. They are more interested in the policies and getting things done.”
The focus of the team promoting female candidates will be to ensure that more women are selected in the autumn as the replacements for the Tory casualties of the expenses scandal are chosen. The omens are promising. There are two women among the three short-listed candidates for Totnes, the safe seat vacated by Sir Anthony Steen, the patrician who boasted his house was like Balmoral.
Nadine Dorries, the outspoken MP for Mid Bedfordshire, warned her future colleagues: “The difference between male and female MPs is that male MPs are all clones whereas the woman are all individuals. No two female Conservative MPs are alike.
“It’s true that leaders of all political parties prefer to promote dull men over interesting women. It’s safer. Women tend to be more passionate and they [the men] don’t know how to handle that.”
For feminists there is a depressing familiarity about the focus on Smith’s gender. “It will be a symptom of how well we’re doing as a party when people stop talking about the women thing. Most female candidates see themselves as politicians who happen to be women, rather than women politicians,” said one female Tory candidate wearily.
There was a similar fuss about Justine Greening when she became MP for Putney in one of the few crumbs of comfort for the Tories in the 2005 election. The focus on her appearance — she was repeatedly described as a “blonde bombshell” — gave her a taste of what lay in store at Westminster, where sexism may be covert but is still rife.
Women MPs can expect intense scrutiny of their appearance and the pitch of their voices in the chamber. Last month Caroline Flint, the former housing minister, accused Gordon Brown of treating his female MPs as “window dressing”, voicing the frustration many women MPs still feel at not being taken more seriously.
Yesterday Smith seemed undaunted. Westminster is not the only place where women get a hard time, she said: “It’s something I’ve been aware of in the business world. There is a lot of work to be done enabling women to get past it and do well.”
She seems thick-skinned enough to cope with comments in the Westminster bear pit: “I believe in merit above everything else — getting a job because you’re good enough for it.” She has less than a year to prove herself to the voters of Norwich North.
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