Isabel Oakeshott: Quality wins out over quantity for female ministers

The first time she heard it, she let it pass. But when a senior female parlia-mentarian heard the Prime Minister repeat the claim that “around 50” of his MPs are women, she sent him a stern message. “You’ve got to stop exaggerating. You’re going to get caught out,” she told him.

In fact, David Cameron was only inflating the number by two. But the female MP in question is not to be trifled with — and when it comes to the Conservative Party and women, numbers sometimes seem to be everything.

Any day now David Cameron will face an ugly choice: between promoting a grossly disproportionate number of his female backbenchers to make a point or refusing to allow gender to play any part in his selection for ministerial office. In this horrible dilemma, 13 is the magic number.

Against the backdrop of claims that Cameron has a “women problem” the final reshuffle before the General Election has particular symbolic significance. Given the option, he will keep putting it off — reshuffles always create more enemies than friends — but time is running out to decide the line-up to face Ed Miliband and his shadow team in the ultimate test.

The charge that he has a poor record in retaining and promoting female talent has acquired significant traction. The case against the Tory leader is massively enhanced by his well- intentioned but poorly thought-through public declaration in opposition that he would make a third of his ministers women by the end of his first parliament. That pledge, made in April 2009 after a run of bad publicity about faltering attempts to get more women into front-line roles set a clear numerical target. To meet it, he will need to give jobs to 13 additional women.

And that is one hell of a leap. Just a fifth of his ministers are female, only three of whom are in Cabinet. More than four years into his administration, six Whitehall departments — the Cabinet Office, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, the Ministry of Justice, the Scotland Office, the Wales Office and Transport — have all-male Tory ministerial teams. In two further departments — Energy and Climate Change and the Foreign Office — the only female ministers are unelected members of the House of Lords. The fact that this dismal roll call includes the Cabinet Office — No 10’s executive wing — is particularly shameful.

Yet on closer scrutiny Cameron’s record is not as damning as these statistics suggest. Almost a fifth of his MPs — 18 per cent — are women, meaning that relative to their representation in the parliamentary party they are proportionately represented in Government. In a figure that will not come as a surprise to the many highly talented male Tory MPs who feel overlooked because of their gender, particularly from the 2010 intake, 40 per cent of female Tory MPs currently have ministerial posts, compared with 30 per cent of the men. Putting it another way, 20 out of 48 female Tory MPs have Government jobs — leaving just 28 who could still be promoted.

Looking at the list of names of those theoretically available I can see that the real number Cameron has at his disposal is substantially lower. Chloe Smith and Cheryl Gillan have ruled themselves out by voluntarily resigning their ministerial posts, while Lorraine Fullbrook and Laura Sandys are standing down in 2015. Sarah Woollaston has just become chair of the Health Select Committee, while Anne McIntosh has been deselected, and Eleanor Laing is a Deputy Speaker. I doubt Caroline Spelman, brutally sacked from the Cabinet in 2012, would want to be reinstated even if Cameron was desperate enough to ask.

All this means that if the Prime MInister is to honour his pledge to make a third of his ministers women by the next election, he would have to promote 13 women from a pool of just 20 potential candidates.

Under almost any other circumstances, I would argue that he should do it anyway. A pledge is a pledge. Labour will make hay with any failure to meet his target, however near the miss.