Good News Week

Come-uppance must surely be the word of the week. (Or is that two words? Can you have 'uppance' on its own?).
Blair's comfortable Commons majority shrank to one and he was almost defeated.
The obnoxious Blunkett resigned for a second time and his Ministerial career is now toast.
Most glorious of all, if more trivial, The Sun's Editor, Rebekah Wade, spent several hours banged up in a police cell for assaulting her husband.
Christmas has come early.

In my humble opinion, as m'learned friends have advised me to say, Ms Wade is one of the most despicable people ever to edit a national newspaper. And that's a closely-contested field.
Of course, to earn the approbation of Murdoch you would need to have a fair amount of poison circulating in your bloodstream.

The fact that Ms Wade is a woman raises an interesting point about sexual equality. For it seems to me that some people try to have it both ways.
On the one hand it is argued that there should be more women at the highest levels in all occupations because there are no significant differences in ability between the sexes (a view I would support).
But on the other hand, there are those who argue that greater representation of women would produce a qualitative change in the way we are governed, in the nature of the media and all other areas of national life. These two arguments are not compatible.
Proponents of the latter argument were forced to assert that Thatcher was an aberration since she manifested none of the supposedly non-confrontational, non-macho qualities of the female sex. But you don't have to look very far in public life to find other examples. Gwyneth Dunwoody is one of the most fearsome battleaxes in Parliament, though a woman I greatly admire. The Labour backbencher Ann Clwyd is one of the most vociferous defenders of the war in Iraq.

Faced with such examples, those who argue that the world would be a more gentle and rational place if ruled by women would probably say that for women to break through the glass ceiling in our present system they need a large hammer and a big dose of masculine aggression.
There may be a grain of truth in that. But if you genuinely believe in sexual equality it's absurd to blame testosterone for all the ills of the world and to claim that a world ruled by women would be a world characterised by peace, love and harmony.

Is Ms Wade's Sun a gentler, less sexist paper than it was before? Of course not.
I think Ms Wade is a poisonous bitch. I thought one of her predecessors, Kelvin Mackenzie, was a vicious yob.
Gender doesn't come into it.