The tragic demise of the British matriarch

ALAN BENNETT has come up with yet more words of wisdom: he has told us to bring back the battle- axe. Ladies of a certain age, especially Northern ones, were very good at keeping the more unruly element in line, he said in a recent interview, and we should call for the return of the matriarch. Too true. It is an odd fact that as women overall have grown more powerful, older women have lost their infl uence on society.

We all know that the BBC will march out any woman who has dared to show a wrinkle to be shot in the woods but in other spheres older women are also no longer given the respect they once had. We should mend our ways. Middleaged ladies not only couldn’t care less what anyone thinks about them and so are prepared to tell the misbehaving young to step back into line, but they have a combination of life experience and authority.

To put it bluntly, if some yob is breaking and entering or spray painting or whatever it is that yobs do, he is considerably more likely to stop if the person who chastises him reminds him of his mother.

Remember when the historian Mary Beard was trolled a year or so back? When someone threatened to report one of the trolls to his actual fl esh and blood mother, the climbdown was so fast you couldn’t see him for dust.

Society should harness that power and women should also learn that it is self- defeating to try to behave like a man. It has always been acknowledged that women have a civilising effect on the male of the species so rather than trying to match the boys drink for drink and ending up in the gutter where nobody’s going to respect them, women of all ages should make clear their disdain for bad behaviour.

Deep down men want to impress women. It is a lesson we seem to have forgotten.