Mums who don’t know they’re born

I GAVE a weary sigh when I read Alex Jones’s salvo against the BBC this week. Alex co-hosts The One Show and I really like her, she’s a lovely girl – warm as toast both on TV and off.

However… her tart remarks about the Beeb “talking a good game” on the difficulties faced by new mothers made me just a tad cross.

Alex chose to go back to work on The One Show when her baby boy Teddy was just three months old. She did so because, in her own words, she felt deeply insecure: “I was… worried about my stand-in, thinking what if they are amazing, what if they are brilliant?”

So, even though her bosses had “gone out of their way to tell me not to worry and that they would keep my job”, her professional anxiety got the better of her and she went back to work three months early.

Which meant that as Alex was still breastfeeding she inevitably found it difficult to work and nurse at the same time.

“The facilities… aren’t there. They talk a good game but even at the BBC there isn’t a crèche. There isn’t a room where you can express. There isn’t a fridge where you can keep your milk.”

She went on to say she’d wanted to keep up breastfeeding but: “I work in quite a maledominated I WASN’T surprised to learn that Clement Freud, the Liberal MP, writer and broadcaster, used to cheat on Just A Minute. Gyles Brandreth, who guest hosted the show this week while Nicholas Parsons took an unprecedented day off, revealed this week that Freud once accidentally-onpurpose spilt a glass of water on him as he was getting into his stride on the game show.

I met Freud once when I was a environment and it’s hard to be doing a meeting and trying to express your breast milk. It just didn’t work and so I had to throw in the towel.” May I say that much as I like her it’s about time that Alex and other new mothers who complain about their jobs grew up. The recommended time for a woman to breastfeed her baby is six months. Lo and behold, statutory maternity leave does indeed last for six months. Various public sector jobs such as teaching allow women a full year’s leave from work. Maternity leave was nonexistent when I was first pregnant and I was thrilled when it was introduced just before my twins were born 40 or so years ago. To think I had six months guaranteed time with my babies! And an absolute legal right to keep my job. It was ground-breaking. What new mothers such as Alex need to appreciate now is that going back to work early is a matter of choice. You can choose to spend six months breastfeeding your baby or only three because going back to work is what you decide to do. Sorry Alex. You and your generation enjoy a lot of privileges our mothers would have died for. Don’t spoil it by refusing to accept that you pays your money and you takes your choice.

IT WAS WISE To gIvE ThIS frEud ThE SlIp

17-year-old cub newspaper reporter covering a local Liberal election rally. He treated me like dirt, sneering at my questions, interrupting me with hostile comments and eventually turning on his heel and stalking off.

Later, at the same event he rounded on a woman who was standing behind him and ranted at her. Apparently he had a “thing” about people standing behind him.

Odious man.