Conclusion

Abstract

At the time of the 2010 general election, the Conservative party had been out of power for more than a decade. Swept out of power in 1997 by the New Labour tide, they ended up losing two more elections in 2001 and 2005, with three different leaders (William Hague, Iain Duncan Smith and Michael Howard). For much of the first decade of the 21^st century the party seemingly looked, to many voters, commentators, and political scientists, out of touch: ‘male, pale and stale’, to use a popular gender and politics phrase. Having lost its reputation for economic competency, and fighting on the wrong issues, the party had apparently failed to recognize (or admit) that British society had changed, that it had become, in short, less concerned with traditional social values and practices. It fell to David Cameron, a politician from the 40-something generation, elected party leader in 2005 having only been in Parliament since 2001, to lead the modernization of the party — to make it once again electorally viable. A public process of ‘decontamination’ was the very necessary first step on the road back to power, if not to single-party government (Bale 2010; Kavanagh and Cowley 2010; Bale and Webb 2011). One dimension of Cameron’s modernization, albeit one too often overlooked by mainstream political scientists, was feminization. At Westminster, women’s enhanced descriptive and substantive representation had been, for more than a decade, to the Conservatives’ detriment.