Spare me these snobs who sneer at stay at home mums

WHAT an insufferable snob Bond girl Gemma Arterton has clearly become.

Promoting her new film, The Escape, in which she plays a frustrated married woman who ditches her husband and kids to ‘find herself’, she recalled her upbringing in Gravesend, Kent, and declared that being a young stay-at-home mother like many of her former school classmates would have driven her into deep depression.

‘Where I came from, it’s normal for the wife to stay at home, look after the kids and not have a career,’ she said. ‘I thought, “Wow, if I’d married my childhood sweetheart and done that, where would I be?” I think I would have descended into a dark place.’

At this point, can I apologise on her behalf to the 2 million supposedly sad, unfulfilled, lonely housewives in this country.

Arterton, 32, has never had children. Why on earth does she think she is qualified to denigrate mothers who choose to devote themselves to staying at home to bring up a family? What’s wrong with marrying your childhood sweetheart? My parents did and will celebrate their 70th wedding anniversary next February.

What’s wrong with immersing your creativity and imagination and drive

HAVING made £4.5 million flogging her mum’s mementos, Carol Thatcher plans to sell the rest of Lady T’s trinkets online. Mum and daughter were not close, but still it bewilders me. My mother’s leather-bound, childhood prayer book sits on my bedside table. I wouldn’t sell it for a million quid.

into raising your children? I know as many women who have happily done that as I know mothers who have unhappily tried to juggle having a career and children.

Not all young women win a place at Rada, as both Gemma and her sister Hannah did. Not all crave the glamour and affirmation of being a celebrity.

Many stay-at-home mums relish the joy of being there for their children. It can be stultifyingly boring, monotonous and a personal sacrifice. But to many highly intelligent, loving women the joy of motherhood is worth any bit-part in a Bond movie or appearance in The Escape — a film described by one critic as a ‘feminist analysis of the suburban marriage trap . . . profoundly snobbish, patronising and trivial’.

If anything sends these young mothers into a dark place, it’s smug, metropolitan types like Gemma Arterton telling them how awful it is to be a stay-at-home mum.