Women

David Cameron is taking his woman trouble seriously. He will unveil plans to curb internet pornography at a meeting with the Mothers’ Union later today. The government will force internet users to opt in to view pornographic websites when they initially chose their internet providers. The government will also clamp down on sexualized advertising and a new website, Parentport, will be established to allow parents to report inappropriate images, articles of clothing, TV programmes etc. This is a fairly blatant pitch for the wandering female vote, which is exercising Cameroon minds at present. It’s a clear attempt to say: We’re going to help you to protect your children.

In the past year the government has proven good at cauterising self-inflicted wounds. This morning's announcement from Iain Duncan Smith on childcare stems another potential bleeder. His department have found an extra £300 million to prevent further cuts to childcare support. It’s a welcome reversal of an ill-advised plan and a narrowly averted political foul-up. The extra money is needed because of IDS's big welfare reform project, the Universal Credit. One of the big advantages of the UC is that it will smooth out all those ugly ‘cliff-edges’ in the benefit system, particularly rules that say you don’t get help if you work fewer than 16 hours a week.

In a surprisingly testy interview on the Andrew Marr show, David Cameron defended the government’s approach to Europe, the economy and planning. But before the interview really got going, Cameron had to reiterate his Sunday Times’ apology (£) to women for the patronising comments he has made in the Commons chamber. This is hardly an ideal start to conference for a party leader who is struggling to maintain female support. On the Eurozone, Cameron was blunt that its problems were a threat to “the British economy and the world economy”. He also risked a clash with Nicolas Sarkozy by demanding that “action needs to be taken in the coming weeks to strengthen Europe’s banks”.

Back in June, Melanie McDonagh wrote that "the Tories are desperate to regain the female vote". Today's Guardian scoop, a government memo on the need to better appeal to women, proves she's right. In places, the document reads as if it were written by a group of men to whom women are very much from Venus. They are careful to spell out the revelation that "of course women's views differ as much as men's", and their response to discovering their weakness was apparently to find whoever they could in Number 10 without testicles and ask what they were doing wrong. However, it does at least show that the government recognises that it's losing ground with women at the moment, and that it'll take more than footage of Cameron taking his kids to school to recover.

It is hard to overstate the fury with Ken Clarke in the Cameroon circle today. One well-informed Tory source just told me, ‘they [Cameron and Osborne] just can’t wait to see the back of him’ before pondering whether Clarke was now just too old for frontline politics. Another bemoaned that Clarke had managed both to deepen the party’s problems with women and further undermine its reputation as the party of law and order. While one more couldn’t believe how on a day when unemployment fell, two men were charged with the murder of Stephen Lawrence and the Queen and PM were marking a new era in Anglo-Irish relations, the coalition had managed to get a series of bad news stories to top the bulletins.

Oh dear, the Treasury is mired in another controversy about equality after the Guardian published a letter which Theresa May sent to George Osborne before the Budget. In it, she warned that the government could face legal action if it is unable to show that its decisions were made with a consideration to "existing race, disability and gender equality duties." As she puts it: "If there are no processes in place to show that equality issues have been taken into account in relate to particular decisions, there is a real risk of successful legal challenge by, for instance, recipients of public services, Trade Unions or other groups affected by these decisions.

Spare a thought for poor Theresa May. Judging by the reaction so far, she now faces the unenviable task of shouldering almost everyone’s preconceptions about Tory women in government – with Caroline Spelman, Baroness Warsi and the lower-profile Cheryl Gillan for back-up. She will no doubt continue to disappoint feminists and irritate reactionaries, and she will do so while responsible for the notoriously unwieldy Home Office, which has rapidly taken over from the Department of Health as the ministry where political careers go to die. Representation in politics does matter. It is not unreasonable to claim, as Katharine Viner did in Thursday’s Guardian, that “democracies simply don't work unless they represent those they govern”.