Has Little Miss Apprehension missed the point a little?

Little Miss Apprehension was feeling bored. She needed to get the wrong end of the stick because, well, that is what she does. It was several days since she had plunged her political party into chaos after she’d contradicted the leadership on the desirability of a post-brexit customs union.

Oh dear, Little Miss Apprehension. It was several months since she plunged her political party into chaos after she wondered aloud on BBC Question Time why childminders weren’t paid the same as bankers. Oh no, Little Miss Apprehension. And it was several years since she’d resigned from her political party’s front bench after sending a snobbish tweet alongside a photo of a terraced house with three England flags and a white van parked outside.

For pity’s sake, Miss Apprehension! Anyway, Little Miss Apprehension (whose nom de guerre was Emily Thornberry, Labour MP for Islington South and Finsbury) decided to take a leaf from her own book and get in a dreadful wrong-headed muddle about Little Miss children’s stories.

Now, it so happened that a university study, which is to say a study that was carried out not at school or big school, or even big big school, but at big, big, BIG millstonedwith-debt-for-years-after school, had already analysed the books and found them to be sexist and stereotypical.

And of course if Little Miss Apprehension had just said that, it would have been entirely correct. But she needed to get the wrong end of the stick because that is what she does.

So she announced that the “Little” in the title made women seem “lesser” than the Mr Men. Being called “Little” made the characters sound less powerful, although I think Little Mix would disagree really very a lot.

But actually, when you think about it, Little Miss characters are silly because they are little misses.

When they are grown up Misses, Mrs and Ms-es, things will be very different indeed.

Mr Men, on the other hand, are silly because they are men.