Tory Women Hit Out At "Boys Club" Candidate Selection

Female Tory candidates claim they lost out in the last-minute rush to fill vacancies, alleging Rishi Sunak’s allies oversaw a "jobs for the boys" operation.

The party was working under emergency rules to select candidates for 160 seats nationwide in preparation for the 4 July General Election. The process saw local associations offered a shortlist drawn up by Conservative Campaign Headquarters of three or, in the last hours before the candidates list closed, have a single person put forward by the party. The deadline was 4pm Friday.

Inside Downing Street were James Forsyth, Sunak's political secretary, and Rupert Yorke, No 10 deputy chief of staff, who PoliticsHome understands oversaw a "pre sift" of which individuals were allowed to go where in the selection process.

“The boys' club is alive and well. If they don’t like you, you don’t even make it into the mix before the candidates committee,” said one woman who lost out on a selection.

From there, CCHQ’s candidates committee – a group of eight people, three of whom PoliticsHome has been told are women – decided on the formal shortlist.

Emily Sheffield, who was searching for a seat and happens to be the Foreign Secretary David Cameron’s sister-in-law, has been publicly critical of the process, questioning on X, the social media website formerly known as Twitter: “Where are the women deciding on who goes on these lists?”

Nadine Dorries, the former culture secretary, took it a step further, posting that “the number of female candidates getting through and into seats is so low it’s like back to the 1950s” and using the hashtag #jobsfortheboys.

A number of Conservative women have expressed the same sentiment, albeit anonymously, worried about the response from the party.

Why should