Virginia Blackburn

WHAT on earth does Angelina Jolie think she’s playing at? For a woman who has made such a song and dance about the importance of family, she has a very odd way of showing it. Following the split from Brad Pitt, first she banned him from seeing their children at Thanksgiving (the biggest annual celebration in the States.) Now apparently he’s being kept apart from them over Christmas, while a “therapist” is consulted about every move the lot of them make.

If Angelina is intent on totally destroying the family unit the two of them created, she’s going the right way about it. The only trouble is that her children are going to suffer horribly not just now but for the rest of their lives. Study after study (and indeed common sense) shows that it is far and away the best thing for the offspring that relations with both parents remain good. Publicly vilifying the father and denying him access is going to do a lot more harm than the row on a private jet which seemed to be the cause of the trouble.

Fathers should be kept away from their families only when there’s a genuine risk of physical or emotional harm and frankly I, like just about everyone else, don’t believe for a second that Brad is anything like that. Rather, you get the impression that this is one big fat power play between the estranged couple which risks doing dreadful psychological damage to the real innocents in all this, les enfants.

When Angelina Jolie first entered the public domain a couple of decades ago it was as the original wild child, complete with drugs habit, lurid sex life and phials of blood