Conservative Party's favourite club still retains its sexist bias

The Carlton Club, which prides itself on being the top gentleman's club for members of the Conservative Party, has once again warded off the day when it might have acknowledged that women are the equal of men.

Traditionalists at the elite London club have defeated a proposition that women should have "equal status" with men at their premises in St James's Street, a stone's throw from Buckingham Palace. The club was founded 175 years ago, at the time of the Chartist agitation, for the purpose of stopping "unsuitable people" voting in general elections.

Times change, and the club's current chairman, Lord Cope of Berkeley, a former Tory minister, had hoped to achieve the two-thirds majority necessary for a change in the club's constitution to allow women an equal role. In the event, the vote went 147-89 in favour of change, an inadequate majority which means women will continue to be confined to their status as half members.

The Carlton's men-only policy has for years been a running source of embarrassment to the more enlightened Conservative politicians. The first breach in the rule occurred when Margaret Thatcher was elected leader of the Conservative Party in 1975.

Club rules conferred automatic membership on the Tory leader, so the club ignored her sex and pronounced that she could be a full member. Later they started allowing other women into the building, but not as full club members.

In 2000, William Hague hoped he could demonstrate that Tories were moving with the times, by prevailing on the Carlton Club to end its sexist ways. But a sufficiently large minority of members refused and the ban remained. That vote provoked calls in Parliament for a tightening of sex discrimination laws, but Labour ministers, who were quietly enjoying the humiliation of Mr Hague, insisted that it was not a matter for the law.

The club dates back to pre-Victorian times. In 1831, when Whig politicians, Chartists and others were campaigning for a reform of Parliament that would extend the vote to men who had never been allowed to vote before, a group of Tories decided to get organised in the hope of stopping them. The club's first dedicated premises, on Pall Mall, was built in 1835. But the club moved to its present address after that club was bombed in an air raid in the Second World War.