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Did she fly too high for party rivals?

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Competent but unexciting: Tory chairman Caroline Spelman

Hands up all those who would recognise Caroline Spelman if you bumped into her trolley in the supermarket? Hmmm...

Under the last three Tory leaders  -  Iain Duncan Smith, Michael Howard and now David Cameron  -  she has never been out of the Shadow Cabinet.

These days, at 50, she has the ostensibly powerful post of party chairman.

And, of course, she has had a number of high-profile appearances on BBC1's Question Time.

Yet, were it not for the little matter of whether or not a decade ago the taxpayer was funding her childcare, Caroline Spelman would still be just another vague political figure of whom the public is barely aware.

Which is why some important people in the Conservative Party, while worried about new accusations of Tory 'sleaze', are not all that put out by the embarrassment the party chairman is suffering over an affair inevitably dubbed 'Nannygate'.

'Caroline is anything but dishonest and I'm sure this matter will soon be over and done with,' says one senior figure.

'These things are never good for the party, but at least it will mean she is not going any higher. She's gone too high already for someone who doesn't win votes  -  I mean, would you buy a ticket to see her?'

All rather mean-spirited, you may think, but then nobody ever said politics wasn't a dirty business.

Her constituency chairman Graham Juniper has defended her by making allegations of 'sexist' behaviour by jealous male colleagues, and concluding: 'It's pathetic.'

Even so, for Mrs Spelman, a practising Christian and enthusiastic member of the Parliament Choir, the crisis is especially awkward because she is responsible for overseeing Tory MPs' use of perks.

  More... Tory chairman Spelman to face sleaze inquiry into nanny's pay

Only a fortnight or so ago she was asking the Tory leader in the European parliament, Giles Chichester, to explain his actions in transferring £400,000 in staff expenses to a private family company.

But, while the sums involving the well-off Mrs Spelman are relatively small, is the allegation against her any less serious?

As for the fact that it happened more than ten years ago, many are asking why that should make any difference.

Ironically, Mrs Spelman was a vehement critic of the sleaze that seriously undermined the Tories before the general election of 1997  -  the year she scraped into Parliament at Meriden by a few hundred votes.

She worried that sleaze was 'a particular turn-off to female voters'.

You would have thought that the name Caroline Spelman would resonate with women of all ages because not only has she been shadow women's minister, but this is not the first time her children have been at the centre of a major public debate.

Her two boys and a girl, now aged ten, 15 and 17, were all conceived with her millionaire management consultant husband Mark through IVF.

Mrs Spelman bravely disclosed the details in March 1998, during a House of Commons debate about infertility treatment.

Urging the Government to make fertility treatment available on the NHS, she spoke of the 'pain of childlessness' and told an attentive chamber: 'I have gone through the problem of finding it very difficult to conceive and the strain that places on a marriage, as both my husband and I were investigated to find out who might be at fault.'

'That was the closest anyone has seen Caroline being really passionate,' says one close observer.

'It's not her fault, of course, but she's just, well  -  dull.'

She has also spoken up for married women  -  actually she referred to 'non-working spouses'  -  whom she believes should be given a tax allowance for staying at home.

Of her own marriage, however, she has said: 'My husband always expected me to work  -  we treat each other as equals.'

Unsurprisingly, they are equal shareholders in their own company, Spelman, Cormack and Associates, formed in 1991  -  four years after their marriage.

It specialises in advice involving food and pharmaceuticals.

In Caroline Spelman's current expenses difficulty, it probably hasn't helped that she comes from a monied background  -  her father Marshall Cormack was a banker  -  nor that her constituency home is a huge, eight-bedroomed Tudorstyle manor house with a long drive and 8ft gates.

Certainly, the careers teacher at Hertfordshire and Essex Girls' Grammar School  -  who once advised her not to pursue her ambition to be a vet  -  could not have envisaged the prettyish, dark-haired pupil being in the Shadow Cabinet just four years after entering Parliament.

She began with responsibility for international development, then the environment, then local government, and finally as shadow minister for women before becoming chairman of the party last year.

The whisper among her overwhelmingly male colleagues is that she has made it to such elevated heights only because of a shortage of women  -  she was one of only five new Tory women MPs in 1997.

'She's the party chairman outwardly but the really important work at Central Office is carried out by Michael Ashcroft ( the billionaire deputy chairman),' explains one figure, haughtily.

It's unedifying for such talk about its chairman to rumble though a party that sees itself standing on the edge of government.

Indeed, in the Commons, most see her as a competent debater.

But the knockers insist: 'Caroline always sounds as though she's telling people off. She never takes risks.

'I've never heard her tell a joke. At lunch, she drinks water. If only she could loosen up and stop behaving like a geography mistress she might become the kind of party chairman who could go out into the country and drum up votes.'

In the meantime, there is still the little matter of the nanny's salary. Still, at least she can't complain that no one knows who she is now.

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