Hugh is NOT a cad. He’s been honourable and generous to both his ‘babymothers’

HUGH Grant is handsome, clever and rich, as well as funny, famous and the epitome of Englishness. But it appears that we can’t forgive him for one thing: that he’s single. Women seem to resent the fact that the actor is living proof that you can have your cake and eat it – if you’re a handsome, clever, rich, famous male anyway – in your 50s. Like George Clooney, he just keeps gambolling over the greener grass whereas by rights he should have knuckled under decades ago to his bounden duties as Father and Husband, indentured to domestic servitude, always putting Women and Children first.

Women particularly resent the fact that he’s remained single despite late fatherhood. So when Hugh’s special Love Potion Number Nine led to another woman becoming Harry preggers and love child number three, nature inevitably had to take its course: he had to be bitch-slapped by the very sections of the press he was determined to bring to heel during his work for the Hacked Off campaign.

To recap: Hugh has Tabitha and Felix out of Tinglan Hong, and a boy a few months older than Felix out of a Swedish TV producer called Anna Eberstein. And with the news that Hugh has had three children within the space of 15 months by two women, my fellow female columnists let slip the dogs of war.

Impregnating two women within a few weeks of each other is ‘even by modern standards appalling behaviour’, blared one moral mullah’s muezzin. Another tabloid accused Grant ‘of not being man enough to be a proper father’, as if he were a feckless, deadbeat dad off Benefits Street.

I do hope that he hasn’t read any of it. The truth is Hugh Grant has done both a personal service to these women and a public service to the wider community by setting such a responsible example.

I fail to see what he’s done so wrong by impregnating two single women in their 30s, and then proceeding to stand by both. After all, we glumly read every day in family newspapers of all the tragic females who’ve left it ‘too late’, whose ovaries have been shrivelled to raisins by their careers, who are biologically dead by the age of 35 and then lo – along comes Hugh, and Hallelujah! Suddenly it’s raining babies all over West London!

Admittedly, there are two women and three children in his menage, which is quite a lot for one man in his 50s to get around. Yet he has housed his dependants in multi-millionpound residences in stuccoed parts of the capital. Not one single member of his Mormon-- style entourage will ever be a drain on the State. Arguably, he has given two women who might not otherwise have had such status and security everything he could: his English seed (ugh, I know: sorry), houses, time, his surname to their kids – everything, in fact, apart from the privilege of being in an exclusive relationship with HIM. Assuming that is what the women want, which may or may not be the case – though I suspect it is.

Last summer I was at a party when Hugh arrived late. As soon as he entered the room, women covered him like flies on carrion. I buzzed over to congratulate him on the birth of his son Felix, and he responded like any other proud father: he looked tired but happy, said how much in love with his daughter Tabitha he was and then joked: ‘But her little brother – blimey – the boy looks like Kim Jong Un!’

It was all very chummy but everyone was aware he could have one of his famous ‘fleeting affairs’ with pretty much any woman in the room. Hugh appears to me not caddish or feckless at all, given the embarrassment of choice he has available. Indeed, from the little know, he has been generous and honourable to the women who, according to the nostrums of our family papers, were in danger of being left childless and on the shelf.

He has acknowledged paternity. He has stumped up, and provided a baby-plus-house package deal that will mean these single mothers never claim a single benefit. He has said he will be a father to all their children. He will do everything, in fact, apart from be in a formal relationship in a conventional nuclear household with either of his babymothers.

In fact, it appears that he has been so extravagantly benevolent that, were I young, free and single, I would be tempted to take a ticket and join the queue for Hugh myself.