FARCE OF THE A-LIST WOMEN WHO ENRAGED PARTY FAITHFUL
ONE OF David Cameron’s early initiatives was to persuade more women to stand as Conservative candidates.
For too long, he argued, local Tory associations had shown a propensity to select middle-aged, white male candidates from professional backgrounds to stand in winnable seats. This was true: many exceptional female candidates bore the scars.
His push to change this became known as ‘The A-list.’ The idea was that associations would be forced to choose from 150 approved individuals — whittled down from a long list of 500 applicants — a ‘significant proportion’ of whom would be women, ethnic minorities or disabled.
Cameron took credit — and considerable flak — for the scheme. However, it was not his initiative. It was, in fact, the brainchild of senior Tory women, including Anne Jenkin, Theresa May and the late Shireen Ritchie. The former MP Andrew MacKay, then one of Cameron’s senior aides, agrees that he put his heart into the scheme.
‘He pushed really hard. He didn’t think everybody was trying enough. Every week, he’d want to know which seats were selecting that week; what could be done; whether we had enough women,’ MacKay recalls.
Another former aide remembers the new party leader getting ‘really s***faced’ after a long day campaigning in Yorkshire, and talking openly about his frustration over the lack of diversity on his front bench.
‘He got quite drunk. I remember him saying: “I need more Northern accents in the Shadow Cabinet.”’
But the A-list outraged many in the party, from a phalanx of wellqualified men whose dreams of becoming an MP were suddenly shattered, to constituency chairmen who refused to take orders from Conservative Campaign Headquarters.
Former Shadow Home Secretary Ann Widdecombe says: ‘I was completely against the A-list. Cameron was totally image obsessed — he wanted more women, more gays, more ethnics, more this, more that. It was all image.’ The policy resulted in a bitter row over the selection for Widdecombe’s successor in Maidstone and the Weald, after Central Office threw out the local association’s shortlist of one woman and two men.
‘They said we couldn’t do that — we had to have two men and two women,’ Widdecombe recalls. ‘One of my committee said to the Central Office guy: “Does that mean you’re telling us we can’t select on merit?”
‘And he said: “Yes, that’s exactly what I’m telling you.” He was very honest. But that sort of manipulation doesn’t produce the best results. I said: “What happens if we just tell you to go to hell?”
‘And he said: “Central Office will just overrule the selection.” We were absolutely being told how we must do it. It had nothing to do with merit.’
AS A mood of rebellion in the grass roots grew, Tory Party Association chief Don Porter confronted Cameron with a hard truth: ‘Are you aware of all the talented, white heterosexuals that feel you don’t want them in the party?’
‘This did take him by surprise,’ recalls Porter. ‘People around him made it obvious they were more interested in minority groups, or perceived minority groups. Nothing wrong with that at all, I’d be totally committed to that, but the fact was that real, talented people were missing out . . .
‘So at the end he turned to me and said: “OK, you’ve convinced me. Find a way [to ditch it] in which it doesn’t come out that the A-list is scrapped.” I think he was concerned about a headline in the Mirror or the Sun that said: “Cameron’s beloved A-list scheme scrapped.”’
The result was a compromise: the A-list would continue, but local associations would be free to ignore it — so long as there was an equal number of men and women at each stage of the selection process.
Porter concludes: ‘Technically, the A-list is still not scrapped; in reality it is.’