You don't banish our blues with one lilac jacket

Quotas for female candidates? Whoa there! Don't frighten the horse-faced party stalwarts

Women are, of course, fascinated by appearances. So all that is needed to win them – us – over is the right look. Something a little brighter, something a little younger. That belief must have propelled the careful arrangement of the photographs of Iain Duncan Smith with the new Conservative Party chairman earlier this week. Standing behind the leader was a group of party workers, and of the eight in the front row, four were young women and one may even have been mixed-race. What a nice, bright backdrop for introducing Theresa May in her new position as the most powerful woman in the party.

The right-wing press made much, for good or for ill, of the Conservative Party's decision to polish itself up in this way. Indeed, the appointment of Theresa May to replace David Davis as party chairman, which some observers may have seen as merely the substitution of one little-known, braying Tory for another little-known, drawling Tory, was judged by other observers to be just the New Look that the voters want now.

After all, according to one impeccable source in a Tory broadsheet, May sometimes wears a lilac leather jacket "with zips in all the right places". According to another newspaper, her trademark clothes are "the leggiest black leather trousers in Westminster"; according to yet another, her shoes "are the talk of Westminster" for being "so long and pointed you could use them to get the last meat out of a lobster".

She buys them at LK Bennett, I read, and has been photographed in Aquascutum, though she prefers Versace. Those of us who don't hang out at Westminster had to take this sartorial daring on trust, since for her latest outing May decided to wear, according to one sketchwriter, simply "a pale-blue, knee-length suit over a tight white top".

It would be rather nice to see more female politicians going to work in leather trousers, or whatever they thought suited them more than that dull Westminster uniform of straight skirt and too-long collarless jacket. But the Conservative advisers who said that May's appointment showed that the party is "living in the 21st century, not the 19th" are speaking too soon. In order to provide proof of such a shift, Theresa May would need rather more than new clothes – she would need new policies.

After all, even if the choreographers of yesterday's photograph were correct, and women voters could be seduced merely by appearance, then the current Conservative Party is still not making it past first base. One photograph of the leader with one newly-promoted female MP and a handful of anonymous younger women will do little to dent the rock-solid, cast-iron appearance of the Conservative Party as an enclave of pinko-grey men.

And if appearances aren't everything, then the situation is even worse. Because if women read articles as well as look at pictures, then they might shift their gaze from the image of Iain Duncan Smith standing hopefully in front of those youngish female party workers to the list of the complete Shadow Cabinet, which also appeared in some newspapers yesterday. They might also start counting – all the way up to three, which is the number of women in the Shadow Cabinet, and then up to 23, which is the number of men in the said group.

They can also note Theresa May's own careful positioning of her views, which don't constitute anything so revolutionary as a change of policy, or even so rebellious as a change of name. She made it clear that this was one chairman who would never be so politically correct as to call herself chairperson or chairwoman. And she would certainly not be so politically daring as to suggest any move to change the mechanism of party selections. What did I hear you whisper at the back? Quotas for female candidates? Whoa there! Don't frighten the horse-faced party stalwarts.

Such a policy – the only policy that threatens to push female representation substantially upwards – would be anathema to the Conservatives. Instead, May talks about "matching" potential candidates more closely to constituencies, or "sharpening up" the selection procedures. And the prospect of even such matching and sharpening is already making some of the faithful break out in a terrible sweat. Simon Heffer yesterday judged that such activity could be seen as "another indication of the Tory party's increasingly unhealthy obsession with what minorities think of it". There's the rub, as Theresa May must already know; some Conservative men still see women as a minority, and equality as unhealthy.

So Theresa May is not putting forward any actual policies to improve the representation of women in the Conservative Party. As the Caroline who answered the telephone to me in Central Office put it: "There will be lots of helpful nudges in the right direction, lots of dialogue, and Theresa will be going round and talking to lots of people." Exactly the same tactics, in other words, that have propelled women in the Conservative Party over the last decade from 6 per cent of the parliamentary party all the way to, er, 8 per cent. But there won't be any move that would enforce a significant change. So May has been charged with "helping the party to soften its image" without being able to announce any policies that might achieve such a shift.

It's the Labour Party that is always credited with having elevated spin over substance, but whoever started the game, the Conservatives are now obsessed with presentation. In every area the Tories are holding to the idea that they might be able to look different without being different, that they might be able to convince people to see them as caring, or female-friendly, or inclusive, even when their policies are either unchanged or non-existent. "We do need to change," May told the BBC yesterday. "And I hope people are already starting to see those changes coming through."

A hope that is likely to be cruelly dashed, since Conservative frontbenchers have themselves confessed to journalists that they aren't keen to put forward any new policies right now. Instead, they are trying to rebrand themselves by talking about the vulnerable and about being caring, by visiting state school classrooms and impoverished estates, while their policies on everything from the health system to taxation are shrouded in mystery. So it should be no surprise that even if Theresa May can talk the talk of inclusivity, she isn't able to walk the walk into greater equality.

Okay, okay, I think I hear readers muttering, but why should we care at all about how many women there are in this party? Certainly the question looks ever less urgent as the years go by. Despite the dogged efforts of journalists and other MPs to keep them within the debate – so that there can be an argument at all – the Conservatives themselves keep slipping back into comfortable obscurity. Unfortunately for the Conservative faithful, that means that Theresa May's lilac leather jacket won't make a great impact just yet, even on women voters. Because until they have some policies to hang it on, it might just as well be an old suit. Lilac, in other words, may be the new grey.

n.walter@btinternet.com