With chapter and verse she has denounced them all roundly as racist, chauvinist, Little Englanders, fudging their principles, and pandering to hard-faced populism. In the insult stakes, she has scarcely drawn breath, scooping up the mud and hurling it back again with far more deadly accuracy than any of the old boys lined up on the other side.. Political parties are largely tribal, so affiliation to them is more visceral than rational. Clan loyalty and uncomprehending fear of the utterly alien terrain across the floor keeps most of them fixed immutably in their own benches.But underneath there rankles the real worm in the Tory breast - she is a woman Women just don't do this.

Women are the little helpers and helpmeets, the secretaries and Girl Fridays of the party, running the back rooms and the constituencies, loyal as labradors, without whose devoted service the men of the party could not function. Gillian Shephard and Virginia Bottomley are unheeded tokens, patronised, belittled and ignored. "Witch", "bitch", "vain" and "silly" she may be, but what Emma did was above all unwomanly and unnatural.Yet she has proved to be made of tough stuff, standing her ground, rebutting each sally. To each new sneer she has retaliated with more devastating stories from within the bowels of the party: once she was hit in the pit of the stomach by an MP outraged at her vote in support of the Nolan anti- sleaze measures. In these days when divorce is common, almost everyone has some aggrieved former spouse or lover whose old wounds can be gouged open again to serve a purpose, so Janice Caine was duly prodded into reliving the details of her betrayal, humiliation and desertion.There is no such thing as a clean break in politics, but this defection must rank as one of the most bizarrely rancorous.

Nicholson started a relationship with her present husband, Sir Michael Caine, when she was a vice chairman of the party and he was still married to his former wife, Janice. Those women set about her like a pack of hungry wolves, and had it not been for the personal intervention of Margaret Thatcher, who took the view that the whole matter was a load of nonsense, Miss Nicholson's political career would have come to an abrupt halt."The Daily Mail duly dispatched its terriers, who came up with an "exclusive" they could have found in the cuttings. He retorted: "In fact I fired her because her unrelenting demands for more office space, new curtains, furniture and staff were costing more than she was worth... No Miss Nicholson, I don't see you as a woman of political principle. I see you as a hanger-on to the coat-tails of anyone who might advance your ambition."Lord McAlpine, former party treasurer, dredged up the worst dirt when he recalled scandal from her vice chairman days: "Emma Nicholson put a lot of noses out of joint and it was not long before her committee discovered that she was thought to be having an affair with a married man. Nicholson was a fighter for more women within the party and she founded the successful High Fliers recruitment initiative. That always marked her out for special mockery among her male parliamentary colleagues, for the one thing worse than a woman MP is a feminist woman MP.The litany of sexist abuse that has been heaped on Emma Nicholson is worth detailing.