As some blog readers may know, I’ve recently been elected as a trustee of Fawcett, so the last two days have been a crash course on trustee responsibilities and the finance, campaigns and future strategy of the last remaining national campaign for all women (as opposed to, say, student women or young women).

It was Fawcett’s AGM yesterday, a chance to unveil their new look and brand, to introduce new board members to the membership and to debate the issues for women’s equality. It was also, as became clear to a rather panicked staff on Friday afternoon, a chance for the invited guest speaker, Teresa May, to reinvigorate the call for more Tory women she singlehandedly seems to be pursuing within her own party. I’m not quite sure when they issued the invitation that they expected her to come trailing a TV crew… She steadfastly refused to mention whether she had leadership ambitions, though that was clearly the hook: perhaps her opportunity to position herself for high office in a Clarke or Cameron shadow cabinet, whilst enabling Davies to take her on as a sign of compromise in his team?

Her proposal is that the Tories identify
1. the top 100 seats they want to take off Labour and the Liberals at the next election; and
2. the top 100 candidates, of whom 50 should be women and 50 men.

So far so good; it’s clear that the issues about increasing women’s representation for a party seeking to win power are different from those for a party seeking to hold power, and the preferred Labour method of all-women shortlists only works when you hold all the seats that can conceivably be expected to win, barring upsets.

Her patter is also effective: too many arguments about the methods to increase women’s representation assume that the audience you are addressing buys the need to increase women’s representation, which her intended audience (who were, of course, not the 60 or so women sat in front of her) doesn’t.

But where I see the difficulty with her preferred method is in matching candidates to constituency parties: I’m sure the method is fine when you’re target constituency #1, but what choice will be available for #99? She’s tried to find a formula that avoids head-on confrontation with the dinosaurs, but there just isn’t one.

Talking about the Tories reforming is difficult for me. As a loyal trustee, I sat in the front row, nodding sagely, laughed at her little jokes, against my best instincts admired her shoes, and asked my planted question. As a feminist, I’d like more women in Parliament. Yet as a loyal Labour member, I’d like it if the Tories remained unelectable and unrepresentative. I suppose the best outcome is for Teresa’s scheme to be adopted by her party, and said Tory women to be defeated at the election by victorious Labour women.