This is LBC from Global, leading Britain's conversation with James O'Brien.

Three minutes after ten is the time you're listening to James O'Brien on LBC, an awful lot to get through today.

The madness continues. In fact, the madness seems to be magnified almost every day.

I'm not going to tell you the numbers, the percentage

of Conservative Party members that would be happy to see or prepared to see. Scotland

leaving the UK, significant damage to the UK economy, Northern Ireland leaving the UK,

and the Conservative Party being destroyed if that was the price that had to be paid for Brexit. Still, of course, no real clarity

on what they mean when they use that word. The only thing that prompts Conservative Party

members, according to this polling, to balk the notion of pursuing Brexit so blindly as the prospect

of Jeremy Corbyn becoming Prime Minister. The numbers are absolutely nuts, and I shall share them with you later in the programme.

I shall also be returning to the territory of hospital food with the vexed question of why has it become so bad.

But we're going to begin in rather different territory this morning.

Political, yes, but also, I think, avowedly personal.

There's a tale from Andrea Ledham telling the media that senior Tory women told her

that they would not back her as the party couldn't have another woman as Prime Minister after Theresa May. And those of us who

sort of lean towards a belief in general equality, I mean it can get a little bit holier than thou

at times. But the idea that there is nothing intrinsic to femininity or femaleness that makes

you a less suitable candidate to be prime minister than a man.

And it's odd, isn't it, that the Conservative Party is the only party that's given us female

prime ministers, and yet still they are, for my money, perhaps unfairly, the place where it's

more likely to encounter this sort of attitude.

Andrea Ledson's comments today, if they're true, I'm afraid we have to add that caveat now

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