Courting the U.K. Women’s Vote, Online and Unrelenting

They have submitted to sharp questioning in live Web chats on Mumsnet, the popular social networking site for mothers. They have sat for lengthy interviews with Cosmopolitan, Glamour and other female-friendly publications, and regularly deployed their wives in an effort to establish good domestic-coziness credentials.

As they prepare for the May 6 national election, the leaders of Britain’s main political parties are relentlessly presenting themselves as diaper-changing, beach-strolling, stroller-pushing, maternity-leave-supporting, dinner-cooking family men.

Commentators are calling it the “Mumsnet election,” a reference both to the Web site that has become a new station of the cross for Britain’s politicians and to the added significance, in a tight race, of the amorphous thing known as the women’s vote. With the polls showing that many women are still undecided, the parties are working all the angles to seek their support.

The new approach is most evident in the Conservative Party, which in the old days was a bastion of stuffy masculinity whose leaders scoffed at so-called political correctness and whose wives knew that their place was in the shadows. (The category of “wife” included Margaret Thatcher’s husband, Denis, who, at old-fashioned dinners in which guests separated for single-sex post-prandial socializing, reportedly used to file out with the women.)

Not so for David Cameron, leader of the “modern Conservative Party,” as he puts it. Mr. Cameron, 43, presents himself as a cosmopolitan, sensitive new man, devoted to his equal-partnership marriage and to causes like better maternity benefits and better pay for women.

Mr. Cameron calls his wife, Samantha, his “secret weapon,” and she is turning out to be just that, with an increasingly prominent role in the campaign. It helps that she is relatively young (38) and photogenic, with a name that lends itself to delighted tabloid punning. “Wham Bam! Sam Cam to be a Mam (She’ll Need a New Pram),” The Sun reported last month, when the couple revealed they were expecting a baby in the fall.

Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s wife, Sarah, 46, is an active participant in his career, functioning as the designated humanizer of a man who can seem dour, distracted and dysfunctional. Mrs. Brown, a constant Twitterer with more than 1.1 million followers, is also active in Mumsnet. The site began as a virtual meeting place for mothers but now, with 850,000 members, is seen as a potent political force, both a reflection of and a way to influence a group that functions as the British equivalent of the American soccer mom.

“Mumsnet is totemic of the modern mothers who will be the key political battleground at the election,” Deborah Mattinson, a pollster for Mr. Brown, told The Times of London recently.

When Mumsnet celebrated its 10th anniversary at a lavish party at the Google offices here last month, the prime minister himself turned up to pay tribute, telling the guests that the site was part of a “social revolution” that was “changing the way Britain lives.” (In her own speech, Mrs. Brown said that Mumsnet was “like having a new doting mum, a new no-nonsense mother-in-law and a new supernanny all rolled into one.”)

And so much has the site seeped into the public debate that when Mr. Brown, 59, seemed to duck Mumsnetters’ queries about his favorite cookie in his online interview — having already discussed issues like taxes and nuclear weapons — his opponents used it as a chance to torture him politically.

It wasn’t his fault; the prime minister hadn’t seen the question (and the answer is “everything with a bit of chocolate in it,” he said later). But the confusion did not stop The Daily Mail from reporting that Mr. Brown was “apparently unable to decide what the politically correct answer ought to be.” And it did not stop Mr. Cameron from taunting him in Parliament.

“Are we really going to spend another six months with a prime minister who cannot give a straight answer, cannot pass his own legislation, who sits in his bunker not even able to decide what sort of biscuits he wants to eat?” Mr. Cameron sneered.

But Mr. Cameron went on to suffer a new Mumsnet-related embarrassment in his own online chat, when he floundered on the question of the National Health Service’s allotment of free diapers for disabled children.

The online mothers were not pleased when he said he would have to look into it — especially because as the father of a disabled son, Ivan, who died last year, Mr. Cameron might have been expected to know a thing or two about the issue. Realizing he had committed a faux pas, Mr. Cameron meekly traveled to Bristol for tea with, and a talking-to from, the mother who first asked the diaper question.