Shame on the women who turned on brave Fiona Bruce

TUnInG in to the BBc to watch Question time, I was not expecting its regular host Fiona Bruce to be presenting after the week she’s had. Yet there she was calm, cool and professional.

Hardened as I am to social media abuse, I couldn’t have hosted a tV show having been wrongly battered, bruised, named, shamed and derided as some kind of apologist for domestic abuse in the way she has been.

the storm had been whipped up after she was ruthlessly slammed by two of the country’s most influential women’s charities that campaign against violence to women and girls, Refuge and Women’s aid.

on Question time last week, a panellist said Stanley Johnson, Boris’s father, was a ‘ wife beater’. Fiona interrupted, explaining the panellist was referring to the fact Stanely Johnson’s ex-wife claimed he had once broken her nose.

‘ Stanley Johnson has not commented publicly on that,’ she added. ‘Friends of his have said it did happen but it was a one-off.’

Fiona Bruce was doing what she should do on a BBc show — providing context and balance. and since she had been an ambassador for Refuge for 25 years, it is absurd to think she was in any way condoning violence against women.

Yet the boss of Refuge, Ruth davison issued a statement accusing her of ‘minimising the seriousness of domestic abuse and this has been retraumatising for survivors’.

Farah nazeer, chief executive of Women’s aid piled in, saying Fiona’s response was both ‘unnecessary and irresponsible’, witheringly informing the world that domestic abuse is ‘rarely, if ever’ a one-off. there was me thinking the villains targeted by these charities were cruel men!

Women attacking women is always an ugly sight. and by trying to cancel Fiona Bruce, who has tirelessly championed charities supporting abused women, davison and nazeer have revealed themselves to be the worst kind of feminists — self-appointed paragons, pompously parading their outrage in the gowns of the sisterhood while casually chucking one of their own under a bus.

Shame on them. and more power to Fiona’s elbow for apologising, resigning from Refuge, then carrying on with presenting this week’s programme — despite the appalling treatment she has suffered.