FactCheck: women tories
Updated on 03 October 2007
Are nearly a third of the Tory's parliamentary candidates women? Or is this just Cameron's wishful thinking?
The claim
"Almost a third of our parliamentary candidates are women."
Conservative leader David Cameron, Blackpool, 3 October 2007
The background
Today Cameron gave his most important speech since the opus which won him the Tory leadership two years ago.
Twenty four months on - while still nodding in parts of his speech to traditionalists within the party - he was keen to brag about his modernising impact.
Cameron claimed that almost one in three Tory parliamentary candidates at the next General Election will be women. Is this true?
The analysis
When FactCheck called the Conservative Press Office to ask for a copy of the list of Tory parliamentary candidates, Cameron's claim was quickly modified.
We were told: "He was talking about candidates selected to date, not a complete list."
Which puts a slightly different spin on things, as the proportion could change significantly if there are still a lot of places to fill.
FactCheck was advised to look on the party's official website, where there was list of current candidates.
A quick tally of those detailed on the website shows that of 176 candidates, 52 are women. Not quite a third, but certainly close enough for Cameron to use the expression "almost a third".
According to the website lists, constituencies in England have the highest ratio of women candidates, while other parts of the UK do not seem to be doing so well.
Only two out of the ten candidates listed for Wales are women, while there are no listings of women in either Northern Ireland and Scotland.
In fact, if you look at the total number of candidates officially listed by the Conservatives - 176 - it's a long way off the 650 total they will need to compete for every seat at the next General Election.
That means the ratio of women to men could swing quite dramatically, making Cameron's omission of the term "to date" even more significant.
The verdict
The Conservative conference press office told FactCheck today that it could not supply stats on up-to-date candidate lists, and the best immediate method to assess the situation would be to look at the listings on its website.
So it may be that there are more than 200 women out there who will stand for the Tories at the next election, they just haven't been updated to the official website yet...
But for Cameron to suggest that almost one in three future Tory MPs were women, based on current evidence, is perhaps a boast too far.
FactCheck rating: 3
How ratings work
Every time a FactCheck article is published we'll give it a rating from zero to five.
The lower end of the scale indicates that the claim in question largerly checks out, while the upper end of the scale suggests misrepresentation, exaggeration, a massaging of statistics and/or language.
In the unlikely event that we award a 5 out of 5, our factcheckers have concluded that the claim under examination has absolutely no basis in fact.
Sources
List of UK Parliament seats
List of Tory Parliamentary candidates
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