Before anyone accuses me of taking sides in the increasingly tedious "blog wars," let me make clear that what follows is not a personal attack on
Iain Dale. But I read his piece about the importance of women voters in today's
Daily Telegraph with an increasing sense of despair.
Dale may very well be right in his central thesis that women will decide the result of the next general election because David Cameron is more fanciable than Gordon Brown. I just hope to God he's 100pc wrong.
He writes:
"Few non-political women judge a male politician purely by what he says. They judge him on the way he looks, sounds and appears on television. Put crudely, they ask themselves consciously, or unconsciously, if he has got the "fanciability" factor. In an unguarded moment, my sister Sheena told me that she and her friends sometimes play a game called "If you had to, would you?" Simon Cowell or Dale Winton was one unfortunate choice they recently gave themselves.
"This week, I asked her to put another option to her friends - Tony Blair, Gordon Brown or David Cameron. Out of an admittedly small sample of 40 Essex girls, 33 opted to lie back and think of England with David Cameron, three with Tony Blair and a resounding zero for Gordon Brown."Well, all I can say about this is if, as Dale seems to suggest, we now live in a political culture where women cast their votes on the basis of whether they would like to sleep with the party leader, then I'm tempted to think that maybe it's about time I emigrated.
But on reflection, I think I will hang around at least until the next general election to see whether Dale is right, or whether in fact Gordon Brown can yet confound those cynics who assume that modern politics is about the triumph of style over substance.
