It is no surprise that the minister tasked with representing the views and needs of women in the country also appears to have no clue as to the most basic issues affecting them. Equalities minister Lynne Featherstone is known to be gaffe-prone, and yet is one of the most senior women in the party. 

At a women's hustings in 2010 Featherstone appeared on the panel alongside former Solicitor General Vera Baird QC and Home Secretary Theresa May. When a young woman in the packed audience asked Featherstone to explain the apparent contradiction between claiming to be a party that hates the sexualisation of young women and accepting Anna Arrowsmith, a director of pornographic films, as a candidate in the general election (her best known film is Where's the Rent Boys?) Featherstone replied: "There's nothing wrong with sex." 

Baird, a feminist, has no time for Featherstone or her party. "Lib Dems are not reformers but laissez-faire," she says, "hence they won't do anything artificially to increase the number of women MPs. They have little to no understanding of institutionalised discrimination and are far more concerned with the rights of the individual man than anything else."

Despite having launched the "Body Confidence" project last year, a campaign to challenge the pressure placed on girls and women to conform to a perfect body image, Featherstone was recently quoted in a newspaper interview as saying that there could sometimes be a good rationale for plastic surgery — "when you've had five children and your breasts are hanging around your waist".

The Lib Dems cannot sustain a concept of equality that is anywhere near robust enough to eliminate women's subordination in both the public and private domains. Days after the formation of the coalition government in 2010 it was announced that men accused of rape in England and Wales would be granted anonymity. The Lib Dems first voted for the proposal in 2006, but it did not feature in either the Lib Dem or the Conservative manifestos. It was widely criticised by anti-rape campaigners, who considered it a disgrace that the one policy relating to sexual violence was aimed at helping the accused and not the victims, and would boost the widely held belief that most women who report rape are lying. Fortunately the plan was dropped only weeks later.