Virginia Blackburn

KIRSTIE ALLSOPP, until now best known for Location, Location, Location, has just served up a cookbook, the reason being, she says, that she has had to learn to make different meals for her own brood. Given that she has two sons and two stepsons this means an awful lot of cooking. “When my children were learning to eat they saw my stepchildren being fussy so everyone got very fussy,” she said. Unfortunate, certainly. But you have to ask: why on earth is she pandering to them now?

No doubt Kirstie’s family are all totally delightful but to allow children to boss you around like this is mad and we have the proof under our noses in the form of Generation Snowflake.

Children have been treated like pampered little princes and princesses for years. Go on any form of public transport and you will see children sitting down while adults are standing, totally the opposite of what should be the case. When one of these children starts to throw a tantrum, which they invariably do, they are not told to shut up as they are disturbing everyone else but cosseted and asked what is wrong. Everything revolves around them.

And the inevitable result of this is the snowflake crowd: that fragile bunch of idiots attempting to destroy our universities with their insistence on safe spaces, removing statues of people they disapprove of, banning works of literature that might offend them and, in the case of law students, demanding the right to avoid lectures on subjects that might upset them (pity their future clients).

Every time one of these idiocies comes to light we wonder how on earth we came to raise such a shower but the evidence is right in front of us. The current lot of snowflakes are