the times | Wednesday December 22 2021 35
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Buy prints or signed copies of Times cartoons from our Print Gallery at timescartoons.co.uk or call 020 7711 7826Women are turning away from the Tories
Conservatives had a clear lead among female voters in 2019 but outrage at Covid hypocrisy is now starkly apparent
if he doesn’t start connecting with
women.”
There are 67 parliamentary seats
that were won by the Conservatives
at the last election by a margin of
5 per cent or less of the votes cast.
The current gender gap would be
disastrous for the Tories in these
constituencies and many others.
Historically, female voters have
been more likely to support the
Conservatives than Labour: the
Fawcett Society claims that if women
had not won the vote, there would
have been a Labour government
almost continuously since 1945.
Tony Blair achieved his landslide
victory in 1997 by eliminating the
gender gap and Gordon Brown lost
power when women switched back to
the Tories in 2010. Theresa May was
destroyed when undecided female
voters broke disproportionately for
Labour at the election in 2017.
With female voters now shifting
their allegiance, Labour spots an
opportunity and senior Conservatives
sense a threat. One female MP cites
Amber Rudd’s quip that Johnson
might be fun at a party but he is “not
the man you want driving you home
at the end of an evening”. He must do
much more to convince women that
they can trust him or his colleagues
will soon start looking for another
leader who is better able to do so.Alice Thomson is awayThe prime minister has a tendency to
smirk if he cannot flirt, as illustrated
by his discomfort when faced with
Angela Rayner across the dispatch
box. He did not endear himself to his
female colleagues in parliament by
denouncing David Cameron as a “girly
swot”, as if hard work was an insult.
“It comes across as if he’s just
winging it and not taking the job of
prime minister seriously,” one former
minister says. “There’s a feeling that
the government doesn’t get women
and that our concerns have been
completely downplayed or ignored.”
The discontent has been
compounded by the handling of the
Owen Paterson affair and revelations
about parties. It was noticeable that
many of the angriest voters interviewed
after the North Shropshire by-election
were women. One Conservative MP
says the overwhelming majority of the
emails she received complaining about
Dominic Cummings’s lockdown-
busting trip to Barnard Castle were
from women and it is female voters
who are most incensed by the
perceived hypocrisy in No 10.
“Women have carried the burden
of caring during the pandemic,
whether that’s for elderly parents or
children. Then they see a picture
from Downing Street of cheese and
wine in the garden,” she says. “When
you are looking at a massive batch of
seats with majorities of less than
2,000, Boris has got a real problemhe was mayor of London. I thought
he was fun and that he would do
something for the country but I
think he’s done an appalling job this
last 12 months.”
Another explained that she had
lost faith in the prime minister. “I
don’t feel he had the balls to tell the
country how it really is,” she said. “I
don’t believe anything that comes
out of his mouth now.”
The things that were previously
endearing — the tousled hair, the
shambolic speeches — had become
infuriating to these women. FemaleConservative MPs report a similar
message from women in their
constituencies. “I’m not remotely
surprised by the polling,” one told
me. “Women feel let down, that’s the
phrase they use. I’m hugely
disenchanted and so are many of my
female voters. Women by and large
obey the rules and we are having it
shoved in our faces that the prime
minister and No 10 staff thought the
rules only applied to the little people.”
Frustration has been building for
some time, with some senior Tory
women criticising a “toxic
masculinity” at the top of their party.B
oris Johnson has a serious
problem with women.
Support for the prime
minister among female
voters has dropped off a cliff
in the past month, with potentially
disastrous consequences for the
Conservative Party if he is still the
leader at the next general election.
Women tend to be less tribal about
their politics — about 15 per cent are
undecided about whom to vote for
when the country next goes to
the polls — and Johnson is
haemorrhaging support among this
politically crucial group.
At the last general election, the
Tories had a clear advantage among
women: 43 per cent voted
Conservative and 34 per cent backed
Labour. Now those figures have been
reversed. According to the latest
YouGov poll for The Times, 42 per
cent of female voters support Labour
and 30 per cent back the Tories.
Another recent survey by Opinium
gave Labour a 16-point lead among
women, with 44 per cent saying they
would vote for Sir Keir Starmer
compared with 28 per cent for
Johnson; and a Savanta ComRes poll
found that 38 per cent of women
would support Labour and 26 per
cent would vote Conservative.
The switch has been stark and
sudden. The percentage of women
telling YouGov that they would vote
Conservative has dropped 11 points
since October. In fact this change
accounts for much of the overall
slump in the Tories’ poll ratings. Last
week’s YouGov survey found that
Labour and the Conservatives were
level-pegging among men while
Starmer’s party had a 12-point lead
among women. The number of
female voters approving of Johnson’s
leadership has dropped from 31 per
cent to 21 per cent in three months.
The polling data is backed up by
qualitative research pointing to an
emerging gender gap in politics. In
Labour focus groups with women
who previously voted Conservative,
strategists have been surprised by the
intensity of the disillusionment. In
Birmingham one female voter
described feeling ignored by the
party she supported at the last
election. “I don’t think they [the
Conservatives] stand for me, a
working person, who works really
hard and works lots of hours,” she said.
In Watford, women described their
disappointment with Johnson. One
said: “I used to really like him when‘They feel let down,
that’s the phrase they
use,’ one Tory MP says
@rsylvestertimes
Rachel
Sylvester