Oh yes, as a woman I always make all my decisions about who to vote for based on how they come across with their family. FFS.

Also I don't give a toss what SamCam wears, yes she does wear a lot of designer clothes but this is partly because she is given them free or at a heavy discount to showcase British designers, being as she's in the public eye and all. They're all UK designers, she isn't wearing Donna Karan and Prada.

I always think the focus on the clothes once women like her step into the public eye generaly comes from jealousy.

Women like Sandra know that it's done to provide free advertising for the labels, British or not. The idea that they are been given for free, clothes Sandra would love to have but would cost her a fortune, really pisses her off.

Just isn't fair on them is it? Boo Hoo, I'm a woman with a pretty family AND a career, why don't they choose me to be their clothes horse?

I'm an independant woman - give me free things.

_________________
"Now get those trousers off before someone dies!"

I've had the radio on this morning as I've been testing the M74 extension.
(Very nice by the way, I'd forgotten the sensuous smoothness of a road surface that's not seen a Glaswegian winter.
The perspex sound barriers and gentle undulations reminded me of the Motorways in the Netherlands).

Every second caller seemed to be using the same logic.
"I didn't go on strike and I've got a piss poor pension. Holidays, short hours, blah"

I think it's from centuries-old chauvinism that regards a powerful man's wife as an object whose sole function is to reflect how wealthy or virile or righteous he is. The more passively she performs this function the better. Clothes and hairdos are her domain; opinions and politics are not (see Hillary Clinton, Cherie Blair, Lady Macbeth, etc). The French have a word for her, la potiche (the title of a film on current release) — a kind of an ornamental vase.
Furthermore, the appearance of leaders' wives is expected to achieve some impossible combination of glamour, restrained elegance and touchy-feely ordinariness. It's a ridiculous job, and those who pull it off — Michelle Obama, for instance — are really only appreciated as a double negative: she doesn't make her husband look bad.

Or alternatively it's jealousy. Which given Parsons track record I suspect is more likely.

_________________
"Even when you're a super-computer with an IQ of 2000 it's brown trousers time."

Reclaiming "methinks" for the nation

Latest blog post - 2011 - a review (updated 07/10)

Tempting, tempting....maybe I should go there for my holidays instead of France.

Sarah Brown managed two out of three (she didn't really cut it on the glamour front) and it showed when she and Gordon left no 10 - the usual cunts tried criticising her dress/figure etc and got a surprising, but perfectly justified, backlash from other commenters, surprising because of the general Mailite level of hatred towards her husband.

Today I learned that Cherie Blair and Lady Macbeth are actually different people.

Wot, the M74 extension.

I wouldn't recommend the Netherlands for its motorways either.
Nice enough roads, but badly gridlocked at commute time.
Biking on the backroads - now that's a great way to holiday.

Today, Parsons lays into a primary school featured on a reality tv show. As we all know, such programmes are totally neutral and unedited.

Parsons thinks she has identified a "fundamental" cause of the Year 4 pupils' bad behaviour:

I'd like to have seen the chaos if they'd been all sitting in rows, with the teacher lecturing from the front of the class. The Mail never seems to understand that such a set-up is inherently confrontational, nor how groupwork can help pupils to learn.

Parsons contrasts this troubled primary school with the inevitable Mossbourne Academy (which is a secondary school) and with her own grammar school (ditto). She lauds Mossbourne's "petty rules", viewing them not as a time-wasting source of unnecessary confrontation but as a way of coercing children into obedience. In fact, from what I've read, Mossbourne is a great deal less authoritarian than she imagines it to be. She also believes it proper that the academy's staff are expected to work a 15-hour day; many teachers already do this (and sometimes more) but it mostly leads to burn-out.

Oh, and then Parsons picks a fight with Erica Jong, and in her self-appointed role as Everywoman declares IN CAPITALS that:

Memo to Mr Parsons?

But, but, we all sat grouped at tables round the room when I was at primary school in the 70s (do/did most primary pupils) and there was no chaos or more than the normal amount of mucking about. She's talking out of her backside.

This is just one of the items of faith repeated without evidence or debate by the likes of the Campaign for real education.

They claim to have a fix for education, but their current description of education is a fabricated strawman.

If the silly bat went into any of the most successful primary schools, including fee paying schools, she would find the kids grouped round tables. However, that would involve research, which is clearly anathema to Mail columnists.

That's unfair. She watched a television documentary and read an interview in a women's magazine. None of that cut-and-paste from Twitter mularkey — this is real journalism like in the good old days.

From the comments:

Pervert!