Tory MP Christopher Chope’s attitude towards a mother of young children becoming Conservative party leader is a reframing of a bogus argument used by Edwardian politicians who campaigned against votes for women

In 1909, Lord Curzon, who became president of the National League for Opposing Woman Suffrage, declared there were 15 “sound, valid and incontrovertible” reasons why women should not be given the vote.

Most women, he claimed, did not want to vote. What’s more, they lacked “the calmness of temperament” and “the training” in order to “qualify them to exercise a weighty judgment in political affairs”. And, of course, “political activity will tend to take away woman from her proper sphere and highest duty, which is maternity”.

Now, 115 years later, the latter unsound, invalid and ridiculous argument has been resurrected and reframed by Conservative MP Christopher Chope, who claimed that party leadership contender Kemi Badenoch was too “preoccupied with her own children” to lead the Tories and so he would vote for Robert Jenrick, whose children are “a bit older”, instead.

Badenoch’s three children are aged between five and 12; Jenrick’s three are aged between eight and 13. There are plenty of reasons why neither should be the next Conservative leader. The fact they are parents is not one of them.

Tory MP who claimed Badenoch too preoccupied with children to be leader should return to 1909 where he belongs

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