Sometimes I amaze myself with my own foresight. Last November I wrote a Post article about Labour’s selection of its 2015 parliamentary candidates and its use of all-women shortlists.

I contemplated balancing it with some of the innovative things the Conservatives were doing with their selections – particularly US-style open primaries, like the ones used to select their West Midlands Police and Crime Commissioner candidate in 2012.

I decided against it – partly for reasons of space, but partly because the Conservatives’ policy of never announcing actual voting figures in any candidate elections meant that there had been few really newsworthy headlines. I’ll wait, I thought, until something goes calamitously wrong – as it surely will.

It did, of course: sooner, and much more intriguingly, than I’d have dared hope. For the full effect, though, we need some scene-setting.

From literally his first day as leader, part of David Cameron’s project of ridding the Conservatives of their ‘nasty party’ image has involved changing “the scandalous under-representation of women in the Conservative Party”.

It was ambitious, given that the “scandalous under-representation” – 17 women out of 198 Tory MPs in 2005 – was created by autonomous constituency party associations preciously guarding their right to select their own candidates, and resisting anything seriously effective, like all-women shortlists or legally enforceable gender quotas.

Cameron was left, then, with “equality rhetoric and promotion measures” to increase the selection of minority groups – most notably the notorious Conservative Central Office ‘A list’ of some 150 favoured women, black/minority ethnic and disabled candidates, from whom selectors in winnable Conservative seats were ‘expected’ to make their choice.

Perhaps surprisingly, some actually did, and in 2010 the party’s women MPs rose to 43, or one in seven of the parliamentary party, and its BAME MPs to 11.

In the new Parliament, the plan was for the diversification project to be driven by another scheme, favoured by both Cameron and the Lib Dems: open primaries – shorthand for the nominating primary elections in which US parties select their Presidential and legislative candidates.

Shortlisting of applicants would still be by local party officials, but the final selection – either at a meeting or by ballot – would be open to registered party members and non-members alike.

The Conservatives held more than 100 open primary meetings between 2006 and 2010, but Cameron’s vision was to do the thing properly with postal ballots mailed to all a constituency’s registered voters.

Two of these postal primaries were held in 2009 and both winning candidates ticked Cameron’s key boxes. Sarah Wollaston (Totnes, Devon) was a GP and mother of three, and Caroline Dinenage (Gosport, Hants) a local councillor, businesswoman, and mother of two.

To Cameron and Clegg, these postal primaries must have seemed like a magic potion: the key to reforming the membership of Parliament.

What has continued, though, is that local Conservative Associations have been deciding for themselves to forgo the exclusive selection privileges to which their £25 membership fees entitle them, and to turn their final selections – from a shortlist of usually three or four – into open primary meetings.

As for the profile of the successful primary-selected candidates, David Cameron is probably at least moderately encouraged. By my count, there have been fewer women than men, though a higher proportion than the overall one-third so far selected in the party’s target seats.

Our interest, though, is in just one of these women: Lucy Frazer QC, a commercial law barrister who, as re-confirmed candidate for South East Cambridgeshire, has already acquired a small, unwanted footnote in British electoral history.

Let me summarise. Safe Conservative seat; 100-plus applicants, reduced by the local party executive to a shortlist of three women, one man.

In the first two rounds of voting, no candidate gets 50%, and the bottom candidate in each round is eliminated – leaving Frazer and Heidi Allen, a businesswoman and St Albans councillor.

No voting numbers are revealed, even to candidates, who are not permitted scrutineers. Third round: Frazer is declared winner, by 84 votes to 48.

The presiding officer then, quite improperly, takes the ballot papers home, recounts them, and discovers a serious case of incompetence and/or malpractice – matching precisely, would you believe, a key plot device in Jeffrey Archer’s latest novel, Best Kept Secret.

Yes, the Jeffrey Archer whose well-known family home at The Old Vicarage, Grantchester is in… South East Cambridgeshire!

In the final vote, a pile of 25 ballot papers was marked as being for Frazer, although apparently only the top two actually were, the rest being for Allen.

The true result, therefore, should have been 61 for Frazer and 71 and a majority of 10 for Allen.

In Archer’s version, Sir Giles Barrington narrowly retains his seat for Labour at the 1955 Election, thanks to his eagle-eyed young nephew, Sebastian Clifton, having observed that one of the piles of 100 ballot papers allocated to his Conservative opponent, Major Alexander Fisher, “has a Fisher ballot paper on top, and the 99 underneath are for Uncle Giles”.

Archer arranges for the misallocation to be discovered and confirmed during the recount already requested by Sir Giles.

Heidi Allen was less fortunate.

Not knowing her first and second round votes, she was unaware when the result was announced that she had inexplicably ‘lost’ over a dozen of her supporters between the second and third counts.

Confronted with this total car crash, Conservative Campaign HQ first claimed that the ballot papers should have been shredded (which they shouldn’t – not for three months), then walked away from the whole thing.

The South East Cambridgeshire Association then compounded their self-inflicted fiasco by refusing to contemplate a recount, calling instead an emergency closed meeting to which they invited Frazer but not Allen, and voted to reaffirm Frazer’s election in the interests of ‘party unity’.

As an outsider, I can’t help but be amused and, given the Archer connection, distinctly curious.

But I do also hope that this episode, awful as it is, doesn’t seriously set back what is potentially one of the more interesting electoral initiatives in recent years.

* Chris Game is from the Institute of Local Government Studies at the University of Birmingham