Remember how the term ‘wife-beating’ was put in quotation marks throughout the article to cast doubt on whether or not it really exists? And how The Mail managed to get through only three sentences before introducing some extremely biased critics to slam the relationship lessons as madcap feminism, pcgonemad and a waste of school resources?

Remember how they pointed out that men are far more likely to be the victims of violent crime and that women are ‘becoming increasingly aggressive’, next to one photograph of a chap playfully slapping his wife about with the caption ‘Feminist agenda’, and another of a feckless looking teenage girl SMOKING A CIGARETTE with the caption ‘Perpetrators’?

You may recall it all too vomitously, but The Mail appears to be suffering from amnesia. In a single month, they’ve left behind the medieval views on relationships that made them the target of such scorn a few weeks ago, and have finally caught up with the 21st Century. They’ve had a change of heart, and now agree that violence and sexual harassment of women and girls is indeed ‘disturbing’. Here’s the opener:

A third of teenage girls have been sexually abused by their boyfriends, disturbing new research has revealed.

In the most hypocritical about-turn since the Prada slipper-wearing Pope said Christmas had become too materialistic, they add:

The findings have led to calls for schools to help girls trapped in abusive relationships – and to tell them that violence and pressure to have sex is wrong.

Why…that almost sounds like…Harriet Harman’s relationship lessons! But I thought they were dreadful, man marginalising, militant feminist indoctrination?

It continues:

More than 1,300 youngsters across the country were interviewed for the research, which was carried out by the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children and the University of Bristol.

One in four had suffered physical violence including being slapped, punched or beaten by their boyfriends.

One in four? Hang on, isn’t that the same 25% of women that James Slack so casually dismissed as inconsequential compared with the 75% of male victims of violent crime in the Mail’s seemingly now forgotten previous article. Then, of course, Slack failed to mention that the vast majority of those men who make up that 75% of victims had been assaulted by other men, while the majority of female victims of violence had not been assaulted by other women, but by men as well. He seemed desperate to convince us that, even if help were needed, which it wasn’t, it’s men who need it, not women. Now the Mail’s painting a picture of millions of young women living in fear of abusive boyfriends. Educating children about sexual aggression and violent relationships was agenda-driven politically correct nonsense 30 days ago, but is now something in urgent need of implementation.

Bizarrely, the two articles are based around very similar findings and discuss exactly the same thing (school lessons on domestic abuse), yet the angle has completely reversed. Nothing has changed except the editorial stance: in both instances, someone has said that domestic abuse is a problem and that the key to reducing it is education.

Quite right, too, and the Mail should be applauded for apparently waking up to the ghastly problem of domestic violence. But how can such sudden change of heart be reconciled with their past form? Was last month’s disgusting tirade against women and the dismissal of sexual abuse motivated simply by the fact that the issue had been raised by a female Labour MP and therefore had to be derided at all costs, but now the politically neutral NSPCC have said the same thing it’s acceptable to agree?

Devoid of a left-wing champion, the Mail can now fit news of sexual harassment and teenage violence into their interminable broken Britain narrative. Without Harriet Harman forcing Dacre and co. to blindly disagree with claims that women suffer as a result of male violence, they can frame the topic as yet another example of the licentiousness of the nation’s youth, which is, in Mail land, a result of the Government’s liberal approach to (ironically) sex education, erosion of moral standards, and Labour’s hatred of marriage and the family. The absence of the very same school lessons they campaigned against in August becomes evidence in September of the unwillingness of the state to nurture and protect its children.

While it may sometimes appear that the Mail has a set of rigidly defined conservative values, in reality it will abandon its principles as soon as a more convenient angle comes along  – just so long as it can portray an image of Britain broken beyond repair, governed by idiots, populated by cretins.