Interesting times to be in Delhi last week, watching the rocky path of the women’s reservation bill through Parliament. While, as a woman, I cannot help but be delighted at any promotion of my still unequal gender, I equally cannot help feeling disappointed that such measures continue to be required to give women a public voice, and even more so when the same applies here in our far older democracy. I wrote in the last Westminster Gleanings that voters in this country, Labour or Liberal Democrat as much as Conservative, are small ‘c’ conservative in the choice of their party’s local parliamentary candidates. This applies whether or not the candidate has any real chance of winning the parliamentary seat. In an ideal world, people want local candidates who they know, who know them and who understand their constituency geographically and demographically.

Of course, there may not always be so suitable a contender for all or any party, but the parachuting in of candidates with the right national party profile by party central offices continues to alienate constituency associations, and this regrettably applies equally, if not more so, where all women shortlists have been imposed. The new Conservative candidate here, in my father’s old constituency, is a woman seen to have been rewarded for her work as a policy advisor in the office of the shadow chancellor, George Osborne. The shortlist included both women and men, but many will have sympathized with the view of one local blogger: “Experience at Credit Suisse, First Boston, McKinsey and Bank of America. Just what we rural types in deepest Wiltshire have been waiting for.” Gender was not an issue at stake — rarely is it in many other places — except that the quality of so many of our existing — and perhaps too our potential — female politicians is so dismal.

Our recent women members of parliament have not been an inspiring bunch — think of all those ‘Blair’s babes’ who have fallen by the wayside, including some implicated among the worst expenses offenders. Few have achieved the image of intellectual rigour, campaign skill, determination, attractiveness, humour or charm of manner of some of our earlier women parliamentarians, like Barbara Castle and Shirley Williams and, in the case of Margaret Thatcher, whatever I may think of her politics, straightforward bulldozing power. These days they are inclined to be a pretty dank, faceless and often spineless bunch, and hardly an example encouraging to those associations faced with a female shortlist. Only think of the terrifying professional virgin Ann Widdecombe, newly packaged as the “People’s Politician” on the Conservative side and, on the face of it, the more normal Caroline Flint, former Europe minister, who resigned on the back of a statement saying that Gordon Brown had used her as “window dressing”.

I have a feeling that India’s potential female politicians are made of sterner stuff, honed by harder struggle and will, however it is packaged, and embrace any opportunity to make their voices heard as the vanguard of their sex and for the betterment of their country. Meanwhile, as an alternative ploy, the wives and mothers of our politicians are being brought to the fore in support of, to quote Gordon Brown’s wife, Sarah, their ‘hero’ spouses or sons. Cherie Blair continued to work as a barrister when her husband was prime minister, although she could also play the clingy wife when required, but now some members of the press are suggesting that our election result may hinge on the wifely images of peripheral females, thus attempting, neatly if improbably, to put several other highly professional women with independent careers right back in their corsets and their kitchens.

Long gone, or at least so I hope, are the days when party associations in even the most rural and reactionary constituencies here assumed they were getting two for the price of one. If they had a male MP, the wife came as part of the package for free. My mother must have been one of the earlier rebels against such expectations, with a fully fledged career of her own in the political sphere that began from the earliest years of her marriage at age 19. She did her fair share of local campaigning, but precious little of avoidable prize-giving and fete-opening — she didn’t have the time and became national vice-chairman of the Conservative Party, an unconservative one at that, not long after my father was elected to parliament for the first time.

In the last few days, David Cameron’s mother has been wheeled onto the stage, not literally, you understand: she is a fit, 75-year-old former magistrate, who is ready to add a down-to-earth family gloss to her son’s image and an indication of the important values inculcated by her during his childhood, those that by implication are valuable in a future leader. His wife, Samantha, has been seen supportively watching speeches and appearances since his election as Conservative leader, and that in spite of a serious business career and young children. It is hard to know whether Cameron is benefiting from these attempts to humanize his image further. His popularity continues to fall and aside from candidates’ lists and alternately vague policy plans or hardline cost cutting threats, he is being seen as a much colder fish than the man who had all our sympathies when his young disabled son, Ivan, died. A source who has encountered both men on a number of social and royal occasions suggests that Gordon Brown, for all his apparent lack of people skills, makes far greater efforts to be friendly to those not seen to be of obvious importance.

Maybe Sarah Brown is responsible for her husband’s unexpected, and not regularly apparent, human touch. Of the party leader’s wives, she is the one who, while undoubtedly a professional, has turned her public relations training and skills wholly to the requirements of her family and husband and allowed herself to become, even moulded herself to the role of, ‘election accessory’ with Michelle Obama as her shining role model. Well, I suppose the photographs of wives being wifely can fill the Sunday supplements but it does little for women in general and I doubt the voters will choose to be swayed by loyal wives or mothers or be other than put off by openly uxorious political leaders if they choose to portray such sickening images as election winners.

What a pity it is that we don’t have a female party leader to change this peculiar picture except in the Welsh Liberal Democrat Party, not exactly a centre-stage concern. In India, reservation of seats may redress the gender imbalance in political power and perhaps in time all women shortlists will make a difference here. But the focus on political wives, however independent in reality, does nothing for the cause, and other ways into parliament and into government and leadership must be found than the imposed shortlists of either gender that will remain sources of contention among our essentially conservative local political associations and discourage their efforts to get a disenchanted public to the polls at all.