Message to Cameron: it will take more than charm to win back women voters

Government plans to boost female support include some interesting ideas, but too much of it is PR and presentation.

This may come as a surprise to those of us who see a blue-tinged condom when we look at his face, but women helped put David Cameron in Downing Street. In particular, the big swing of support away from Labour and towards the Conservatives by women working in skilled manual jobs was one of the many hammering blows to Gordon Brown's prime ministerial career.

The Tories have tried to capitalise on this success with a creature they dubbed the "Holby City woman" – middle-aged women doing clinical or clerical jobs, though not all in the fictional hospital – by trumpeting that they would be the "most family friendly government ever". Oddly, their definition of "family friendly" has included cuts to child benefit, the child trust fund, and maternity support since coming to power. Even childless women (admittedly not a group much mentioned by the coalition) have been hit harder than men by the greater number of jobs lost in the public sector.

So it should come as no surprise that research (from the Resolution Foundation) shows that overall levels of "approval" for the government have fallen to 25% among women, 8% lower than for men. Talking of the "women's vote" should always come with a caveat, of course – we don't talk of the "men's vote" – but evidence of collapsing support from the female C2 vote that provided such key support in marginal seats is so worrying Cameron that he is poring "almost masochistically" over polling evidence, according to the Daily Mail.

So what to do? The first thing seems to be to assemble a group to point out that policies that hurt the largely female workforce dependent on public sector pay and pensions, compared with highly paid bankers (nearly all men), will not be universally popular.

Too much of the resulting policy document unveiled by my colleague Polly Curtis is concerned with presentation and PR. I know this shouldn't come as a surprise for a coalition run by a former PR man, but the most patronising suggestion was the one that women who are "struggling to make ends meet" will be cheered by changes to child benefit that frontload support for babies. These are the women, lest we forget, who have just lost child trust funds as well as child tax credits. Even the policy wonks behind the document admit that giving universal credits to women directly is a "largely symbolic gesture", while a proper ban on advertising to children should have happened already given how often MPs talk of it when not in the company of big business.

Again, I'm not sure that holding your own "personal budget" for a maternity service helps when you can't find an available midwife within a 10-mile radius. Ditto education vouchers.

But there are some interesting ideas that warrant discussion among the 12 suggestions included in this mini manifesto. The idea of a pay-sharing website in order to provide some transparency on equal pay is a good one, as is having a debate on the long summer holiday (although I'm not sure how that helps teachers – many of whom are, er, women).

Anything that highlights the UK's poor progress on women in senior business positions should be welcomed, as long as a "No 10 summit" is not just that and results in a proper action.

Despite the very real issues at the heart of this document, it would be foolish to deny that there is a communications issue here. Brown was defeated by the economy spiralling away from him, but he was not helped by his image as a bit of a macho bully. Similarly, it will be his handling of the economy that does for Cameron, but he cannot be helped by the sense that this old Etonian with the black-tie wearing chancellor joking about masturbation cannot truly understand most of his voters. And not just the female ones.

9.

By Tom Whitehead, Mark Hughes and Sarah Rainey

7:00AM BST 15 Oct 2011 The Telegraph