The 2010 general election was, pretty much, a male affair. Senior women from the main parties were curiously absent from the campaign and silent during the rows that blew up over taxation and spending. Attention was resolutely focused on the three leaders as the TV debates dominated the campaign and, in the end, more column inches were devoted to their wives’ outfits than equality.

At constituency level the story was not much better. In as many as 262 seats the three main parties all fielded male candidates, compared with just 11 seats where the main contenders were all women. The election was just too close to make gender an issue.

Not surprising, then, that there was no great breakthrough in the numbers of women entering Parliament. For all the talk of new dawns, it was old politics as usual when the 2010 intake took their seats for the first time. In terms of the numbers, there were 142 women MPs, compared with 126 in 2005, equivalent to 22 per cent of the total. That puts Britain on a par with the United Arab Emirates in terms of female representation.

The Conservatives made the most headway from their low base of just 18 MPs, 9 per cent of the parliamentary party, when the election was called. They emerged with 48 MPs, 16 per cent of the parliamentary party. Their success did not come easily. It was the result of considerable efforts, not in the approach to the election but throughout much of the previous Parliament, to make sure that a decent number of women candidates ended up in winnable seats.

For a while, they had the controversial “A” list comprising 50 per cent women from which the best seats were required to choose. In the end it was scrapped, such was its unpopularity, but it did help to boost the numbers. There was also a mentoring programme and, of course, plenty of encouragement from David Cameron.

In the end, though, it was not the sea change that the leadership had hoped for and privately senior party figures would admit that there was clearly farther to go.

Campaigners for equality worry that if this was the Conservatives’ best chance to push the agenda then the results look particularly disappointing. “The Conservatives do deserve to be congratulated. They trebled the number of women MPs. But you cannot help being left with the feeling that they could have gone a lot further. They had a new leader, they were ahead in the polls. They might not have such a good opportunity in the future to push this agenda,” Ceri Goddard, chief executive of the Fawcett Society, said.

Labour lost women MPs in terms of numbers, with 81 in the new Parliament compared with 94 in the last. In percentage terms the total rose slightly to 31 per cent from 27, largely owing to the party’s use of all-women short lists in many winnable seats. That is unlikely to change in future elections.

The performance of the two main parties left the Lib Dems looking particularly feeble. They lost two of their already tiny pool of female MPs and now have only seven, equivalent to 12 per cent of the parliamentary party. Their poor record was underlined when the party had no woman MP senior enough to be in contention for the five Cabinet positions offered to the party under the deal.

Ms Goddard said that the Liberal Democrats were left looking very exposed, and had a fundamental problem if they were serious about increasing female representation. The party has an ideological opposition to positive action, a position backed powerfully by younger women in the party despite warnings from grandees such as Baroness Williams of Crosby that they will never get anywhere under existing procedures.

“To be fair to the party, they ran about half and half male and female candidates, but clearly the men were in the best seats. The party consistently refuses to adopt positive action to increase the number of women, which we think is an odd position given they are the party of electoral reform,” Ms Goddard said.

So what do the new women MPs now amassed on the government benches want to do with their power?

Despite the derision of the Blair babes, Labour women used their numbers to push for more maternity leave and pay, and new rights for flexible work, very much bottom-up reforms. Conservative women say that they will push for even grater reform on flexible work so that as many men and women as possible can work part time and, perhaps surprisingly, equal pay. And they may make their presence felt most by opposing a key leadership policy, tax breaks for married couples, that many think is not the best use of money.

They may, however, have to expend their political capital in other ways too. There is already concern that the “new politics” of the coalition is perhaps not so much of an opportunity for women as a challenge. Women were absent from the coalition negotiations with both the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats fielding all-male sides. And in the scramble for a workable deal between the parties, the argument for fair representation at Cabinet level was somehow lost.

The first coalition Cabinet had just four women, and only one running a big department, with Theresa May at the Home Office. Analysts say it was not a great start. “Cameron and Clegg were acutely aware they have very few women on which they could credibly draw,” said Colin Hay, Professor of political analysis at the University of Sheffield. “The politics of the past was gender discriminatory. The irony, in a way, is that the Cabinet remains a sort of last bastion of that old order.”

Bad news for big spenders: money can’t buy you votes

Sam Coates

Chief Political Correspondent

For donors thinking of filling the coffers of Britain’s political parties, there could be few worse advertisements than the previous Parliament. Three of its five years were stained by continuing police investigations; Scotland Yard interviewed a sitting Prime Minister for corruption offences; and more than half of its MPs had to hand back money after claiming for expenses they were not rightfully owed. Trust in politicians dropped to levels never seen before: only one in ten people thought MPs told the truth. Public antagonism was stoked by an often hostile media and insurgent blogosphere picking over the personal lives and motivations of public figures, especially donors who were often treated as if they had already been found guilty of paying for access to power.

Given the contempt with which so many politicians came to be held – one utterly blameless Lib Dem quit the Commons after his wife was spat on in the street – it is perhaps a surprise that just so many moneymen kept their faith and continued to write their cheques, mainly to the Conservatives. Over the course of the Parliament donors gave money to David Cameron at rates never seen before in British politics.

In his four years as Leader of the Opposition, from January 2006 to May 6, 2010, a record £122 million went through Tory coffers, by any international political yardstick an extraordinary amount. Barack Obama’s presidential campaign committee in 2008 raised £450 million. That was to fund a campaign that won decisively in a country where campaigns hinge on TV advertising and with an electorate five times the size. In domestic terms this figure is also striking: Labour’s income was £71 million over the same period, although £22 million of this came while Tony Blair was still in office. It also beats sums raised in previous Parliaments: the Tories’ income was £49 million and Labour’s £61 million between 2001 and 2005.

Perhaps more intriguing is the limited impact that this vast spending appeared to have. By Mr Cameron’s own yardstick, set in a Spectator interview shortly before polling day, his own campaign was a failure. The Conservative vote increased by 3.8 percentage points on its 2005 vote: an increase of 2 million votes net, or, taking into account the higher number of votes received by rival parties, 1.1 million more than last time. In other words, every additional vote cost the Tories £111.

What is more, for the shrewd financial investor, the archetype of the modern Tory donor, the way the Conservative Party operated under the stewardship of Andy Coulson, Steve Hilton and ultimately George Osborne as general election co-ordinator, must have seemed horrific. At a national level, half a million pounds was gambled on cinema advertisements that were never shown, £400,000 on a January 2010 “cut the deficit not the NHS” poster campaign later disowned by some senior figures. About half a million was spent on a much-ridiculed “don’t be a tosser” campaign on the national debt and the same sum again on a national newspaper campaign to recruit internet “friends of the Conservatives”, which was never mentioned again by the leadership.

The previous Parliament brought the downsides of political giving into sharp relief. Of these, the loans-for-peerages saga, which overshadowed Mr Blair’s final year in office, was perhaps the most seismic, involving the Prime Minister and senior staff, 136 people questioned by Scotland Yard’s Special Crime Division, 6,300 documents handed to the Crown Prosecution Service and four people arrested, including a Downing Street aide at dawn. At its heart was an allegation, never tested in a court and strongly denied by all those involved, that Labour figures seduced wealthy donors with promises of peerages in return for vast secret loans to bankroll the party through the 2005 election campaign.

It came to light in 2006 after it emerged that four Labour supporters had been turned down for peerages by the House of Lords Appointments Commission. Chai Patel, the founder of the Priory healthcare group, publicly complained after his application was leaked to a newspaper, then rejected. It soon emerged that three other businessmen were put forward for peerages – Sir David Garrard, Sir Gulam Noon, and Barry Townsley – having all made huge loans to Labour before the election at the behest of Lord Levy, Mr Blair’s gregarious fundraiser. Sir Gulam even revealed that he had been told by Lord Levy to remove references to his £250,000 loan to Labour from his peerage application form.

Despite an ignominious political tradition of peerages for donors, epitomised by Harold Wilson’s Lavender List, opposition MPs started complaining that there had been a breach of the Honours (Prevention of Abuses) Act 1925, introduced after David Lloyd George sold honours for cash. An initial inquiry by the Public Administration Committee was halted after Scotland Yard agreed to investigate a complaint by Angus MacNeil, a Scottish Nationalist MP. The police investigation was initially treated lightly by Downing Street, until a number of arrests culminating with that of Lord Levy, who was brought in for questioning. Ruth Turner, an aide to Mr Blair, was arrested at dawn and questioned under suspicion of perverting the course of justice. The inquiry had reached the heart of No 10. In December 2006 Mr Blair became the first serving Prime Minister in history to face a police interrogation, seeing officers three times in Downing Street.

Mr Blair’s staff had raised the stakes, warning Scotland Yard that the Prime Minister would resign if he was arrested while in office. In fact, Mr Blair left office before the investigation was complete. After 16 months, the inquiry was dropped without charges by the Crown Prosecution Service. The CPS said that it had never intended to go to court unless there was “unambiguous agreement” between two people that a gift would be made in exchange for an honour, adding: “There is no direct evidence of any such agreement.”

Officers in the Speciality Crime Unit, which had pursued the case, were unhappy. They believed that they had two strong pieces of evidence: the diary of Sir Christopher Evans, who loaned money to Labour and was later arrested, which detailed conversations with Lord Levy. Detectives believed that this provided “spectacular” evidence of what they interpreted as an agreement for Sir Christopher to be ennobled in return for the loan. Detectives had also discovered that Downing Street officials initially drew up a plan to give peerages to eight of the twelve businessmen who secretly bankrolled Labour’s 2005 general election campaign: four more than had been thought.

The reason for the CPS decision, apparently late on in the investigation, to demand “unambiguous” evidence as the basis of a criminal case and thus rule out the use of the two strongly circumstantial pieces of evidence in police hands remains a mystery. The investigation, which spanned the transition of power from Mr Blair to Gordon Brown, highlighted the culture clash between politicians and police, with the friction between both sides often played out in the media. It highlighted the levels of ignorance among many officials about the electoral reforms Labour had brought in during the first Parliament but now showed little sign of bothering with. It also came as the Labour Party was adjusting to life without large numbers of individual donors, forcing a return to a reliance on trade unions.

By the end of the Parliament, notions of abandoning the union link, once aired by Blairites such as Alan Milburn, seemed fanciful. At the lowest point in its popularity early in 2008, union funding accounted for 92 per cent of donations to Labour, amid claims that the party was solvent only because of a guarantee from Unite, the super-union, that it would never allow it to go bust. In November 2007, it emerged that Labour’s third biggest donor, David Abrahams, had concealed his identity and given hundreds of thousands of pounds in the names of his secretary and a builder, illegal under electoral law. Mr Abrahams, a colourful Tyneside lawyer, said he had done so to avoid the limelight. Facing a police investigation, Mr Brown fired the Labour general secretary, Peter Watt, who carried the can for the arrangement set up by his predecessors. In May 2009 the CPS decided again that there was insufficient evidence for any prosecution.

The police also investigated the admission in December 2007 by Peter Hain that some donations to his own campaign to become Labour’s deputy leader “were not registered as they should have been”. The police inquiry, at the request of the Electoral Commission, cost him his post as Work and Pensions Secretary. He was cleared 11 months later, however, after prosecutors questioned the watchdog’s interpretation of the law, suggesting that no one involved in Mr Hain’s campaign could be prosecuted.

This was one of several uncomfortable moments for the Electoral Commission. In its first full term between 2001 and 2005 the watchdog, which oversees money in politics, was regarded as a largely benign if somewhat bureaucratic body. But its failure to see that political parties were taking out huge secret loans led to accusations that it was unfocused, too passive and failed to use its powers to investigate allegations of wrongdoing. It defended itself vigorously, saying that it could only act using the laws passed by Parliament. Nevertheless, the commission strengthened its investigative capacity and started casting its spotlight elsewhere, bringing its own complications when it started picking over the donations by Lord Ashcroft to the Conservatives.

Lord Ashcroft, Tory vice-chairman, businessman and philanthropist, had long been a Labour hate figure whose funding they blamed for losing their party a number of seats in 2005. He revelled in his pariah status. After receiving his peerage in 2000 from William Hague, then Tory leader, he attempted unsuccessfully to become Lord Ashcroft of Belize, reflecting his dual citizenship. He stopped donating to the Conservatives under his own name in November 2001, fuelling suggestions, which he never denied, that he was no longer on the electoral register and giving instead through a small company, Bearwood Corporate Services.

In 2009 the Electoral Commission began examining suggestions that millions given to the Tories by Bearwood originated in Belize, possibly making the donations against electoral law. The money was reported to have been moved from Stargate Holdings based at Lord Ashcroft’s bank in Belize City through two British holding companies and then to Bearwood Corporate Services. In a 15-month investigation, however, the watchdog was unable to discover what, if any, business the secretive Belize City-based Stargate conducted, and how it was financed. Lord Ashcroft was cleared.

He still ended up causing the party much embarrassment on the eve of the election, when it emerged that he had accepted his peerage on the understanding that he would pay full tax in Britain, only to remain secretly non-domiciled for tax purposes for a decade. This allowed him to save an estimated “tens of millions” of pounds of British tax on his overseas earnings while retaining his ermine.

Yet for all the fury directed at Lord Ashcroft, it is not clear that the marginal seats campaign he ran once he became the Conservatives’ deputy chairman had the impact that many Conservatives had hoped for. His blueprint, outlined in a 2006 pamphlet Smell the Coffee, involved early candidate selection, relentless leaf-leting, repeated canvassing, candidate performance polling and targeted advertising as the key to winning marginal seats. Constituencies such as Hammersmith, Cheltenham and Bolton followed to the letter the Ashcroft plan yet all remained in Labour or Liberal Democrat hands. Indeed, research suggests that the spending advantage in the marginal seats helped the Tories to win at most an additional 14 seats above those that would have fallen anyway on the 5 per cent Labour to Tory swing.

Much analysis on the 2010 general election is yet to be done but the early indications suggest that it was one where, refreshingly, big money still failed to have a decisive impact on the result.

Little joy for the smaller parties

Jill Sherman

Whitehall Editor

The election of the Green Party’s first MP as dawn broke on May 7, 2010 was one of the highlights of a long, unpredictable night. Caroline Lucas’s breakthrough in Brighton Pavilion was some compensation for an otherwise disappointing result for the minority parties, who failed to exploit the disaffection with mainstream politics. Dr Lucas, leader of the Green Party since 2008, capitalised on her own popularity and activists’ hard work for years in southern England to achieve, finally, a foothold at Westminster.

In the final stages of post-election negotiations between the parties after the inconclusive result, Dr Lucas, an MEP for the South East since 1999, briefly found herself being counted as part of a “progressive alliance” as the arithmetic meant that every additional seat was crucial. The plans fell apart but Dr Lucas turned her suitors down anyway, saying that she was interested in cooperation but not a formal coalition.

The Greens made their biggest push in a general election by fielding 335 candidates and spending £400,000 on their campaign. They had particularly high hopes in three target seats: Brighton Pavilion, Norwich South, and Lewisham Deptford. By early morning the day after the election, however, it became clear that Dr Lucas, a charismatic former CND-protester, was the only victor and the party’s overall share of the vote fell slightly by 0.1 per cent from 2005.

The party argues that the decline was a result of a highly targeted election campaign in which it pooled most of its resources into those key seats, with busloads of Green activists brought in to campaign along the seafront each weekend. In the end, the tactic was vindicated, but it was a close race: despite being favourites to win the seat, after a nail-biting count the Greens eventually won with 1,252 votes.

While disappointing for Adrian Ramsay, the party’s deputy leader, who lost in Norwich South, and Darren Johnson, who failed to make much headway in Lewisham Deptford, the most important thing for the party, was winning its first seat. As Dr Lucas said in an interview with The Times, she hopes she won’t be there on her own for too long.

Most of the minority parties failed to recapture their success in the European elections the previous year. In 2010, squeezed out of the running by the three-horse race of the main parties, the smaller ones retained their 14 Westminster seats but took a smaller overall share of the vote, 11.9 per cent, than the previous year. It was, however, up 1.6 per cent from the general election in 2005, mainly because the parties fielded more candidates. The results were particularly disappointing because many of the smaller parties had looked likely to benefit more from the backlash against the main parties over MPs’ expenses the previous year. The scandal may have stopped people voting for those individuals who had been at the centre of the expenses storm but in the end the minority parties failed to reap what should have been easy pickings.

The UK Independence Party, which had seen its popularity soar during the European elections, in which it took second place and 16.5 per cent of the vote, again failed to win a Commons seat. At one stage it looked as if Nigel Farage, the party’s former leader, could be out of the race altogether when a light aircraft in which he was being flown crashed on the eve of the election. He was fortunate to escape without serious injury but was unable to oust John Bercow, the Commons Speaker, in Buckingham.

The British National Party also failed to make the breakthrough that many had feared after the party’s shock success in 2009 when it won two European seats. It did, however, increase its share of the vote by a whisker, from 1.2 per cent in 2005 to 1.9 per cent. Nick Griffin, the party chairman and an MEP, raised his profile after appearing on Question Time on BBC One in autumn 2009, when he faced a barrage of criticism from other panellists. He was humiliated in the general election in Barking, where he stood against Margaret Hodge, the Labour incumbent, who increased her majority.

The BNP also targeted Stoke-on-Trent, where it had previously won a clutch of council seats, but Simon Darby the party’s deputy chairman, was beaten into fourth place after Tristram Hunt, the Labour candidate parachuted into the constituency, won the seat.

George Galloway, the leader of the anti-war Respect party, also had his comeuppance. The colourful Mr Galloway, who made an embarrassing appearance on Celebrity Big Brother, failed to hang on in Poplar & Limehouse, East London, where he came third behind Labour and the Tories. He did not even turn up for his count. Respect’s national share of the vote halved from 2005 to about 0.1 per cent mainly because the Iraq war was no longer a big central issue in the 2010 election.

The march of the independent MPs also came to a halt. In 2005 a record number stood and total votes cast for them reached 141,903. The betting money was on a further surge this year, with a predicted revolt against duck houses and flipped homes. But in the end it was the independents who were driven off the Commons green benches. Richard Taylor, the retired consultant who took Wyre Forest in 2001 on the back of a single-issue campaign to save his local hospital in Kidderminster, failed to retain his seat in 2010. Dr Taylor, who in his professional life wore a white coat, had taken the place of the white-suited Martin Bell, the former independent MP who seized Tatton on the back of the cash-for-favours scandal in 1997.

Dai Davies, who won a by-election at Blaenau Gwent in 2006 as an independent, was also unable to retain his seat. Even Esther Rantzen failed in her well-publicised bid to oust Labour in Luton South. The former That’s Life presenter stood as an anti-sleaze candidate against Margaret Moran, the Labour MP who claimed £22,500 in Commons allowances to fix dry rot in a second home in Southampton. Ms Moran, however, decided to stand down before the election. Her replacement, Gavin Shuker, a 28-year-old church pastor, won 14,725 votes. Ms Rantzen came fourth with 1,872 and lost her deposit.

Only one MP was left holding the flag for the independents: Lady Sylvia Hermon, a former Ulster Unionist. Lady Hermon stood down from her party in March 2010 after the UUP formed an alliance with the Conservatives. Two months later she romped home to retain her North Down seat as an independent.

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