Humiliating women is rapidly becoming as fashionable as that talent-free pencil, Mrs Beckham. If you are a well-known woman or you want to be a well-known woman, strap the body armour to your skinny, or, indeed, cellulite-raddled thighs and brace yourself. You can try to avoid humiliation, of course. For instance, do not be an ambitious wife. You may well be a clever and eloquent professional in your own right but if you were ever married to a world leader, you should know that you are but a pale - and annoyingly loud - shadow of the great man who walks ahead of you. Do not think of becoming a politician if you are attractive or, indeed, unattractive. And, never be a teenage girl unless you are willing to wear a T-shirt with the words “fresh meat” emblazoned over your budded breasts.

So what if Cherie Booth has informed us in her autobiography that Leo was conceived at Balmoral? It is a good story and she has a book to sell. Gerald Butler, QC, a former judge, claimed that she should stand down as a recorder because she was demeaning the legal profession. Can you demean the legal profession? Cherie Booth could not spell the word “discretion”, but where is the sin in knowing that a man and wife have sex when staying with a Queen? I would rather these men with their fingers on the nuclear button had sex. We've already been to war with Iraq. How many other countries would we have piled into if Tony was not having sex with Cherie? Men can get very snippy if they do not have sex, I understand.

Hillary Clinton is another one. Now I am less convinced she is having sex with Bill - I am not sure he could fit her in - but she too has the temerity to be a wife. How could she do that? Still slogging it out in Nowhereville, USA, Clinton is committing that terrible crime of refusing to give in. Real bunny-boiler behaviour. Typical woman. I doubt she can park her car, either. I would not vote for her but it is hardly surprising that she is going to quit only when she thinks she can maximise concessions from Obama. He'd better damn well win, because, boy-oh-boy, is she going to get blamed if he doesn't.

You do not necessarily have to be a wife, though. Equally outrageous are those women such as Caroline Flint, the Housing Minister, whose “briefs” were snapped going into Downing Street. This was a chance to clear the pages of pictures of European women ministers who are so much more glamorous than our own political frumps and accuse a genuinely attractive British minister of playing to the camera. Hussy. Flint reminded one commentator of “Kenny Everett's old character Cupid Stunt”, while another said that “full exposure” was the least you could expect when she “sashayed” along Downing Street. Flint is lambasted for her “bossiness, outspokenness and ill-concealed ambition” - her and virtually every other politician at Westminster. That should teach her to have such good hair; Yvette Cooper, with her sensible short back and sides, can afford a little smile of satisfaction on that one.

Ambition generally is such an unattractive quality in a woman whether she uses her concealer on it or not. (Without, by the way, is not a good look either.) The Duchess of Northumberland is a woman with a vision. Not content to stay in the castle, log on to eBay and spend her way through her husband's reported £300 million fortune (according to The Sunday Times Rich List), she took up gardening. Admittedly, Alnwick Garden is breathtaking in its use of water, light and greenery to create a space of beauty and energy where children and roses can grow together. Admittedly, it is a community resource where the elderly go to have their toenails cut while bringing in more than £50million for North East businesses every year. Lady Northumberland fizzes with ideas about developing the garden, once a forgotten and derelict plot, now a major tourist attraction. But it has cost £35.1million so far - nearly £9million from her husband, £16.6million from public bodies and the rest from private donations and sponsorship - and now she wants another £28million to pay for the next phase. Why? When there is an understanding among those who really know about these things, that after all, it is not really what you would call “a garden”. As for the “young duchess” who “has no training as a gardener”, well, she would go and stick her pretty head above the water feature parapet. Someone was almost bound to try and take it off.

She is clever, and certainly rich enough, not to care what is said. Unlike those poor Aunt Sallys on I'd Do Anything (BBC1). Somebody take this programme off air. Gifted women, some of them only teenagers, others in their twenties, are wheeled out week after week to be beheaded. And it is not a clean cut. It takes two nights before the head finally rolls off the body. They too have made the error of allowing us to see that they want something so badly it hurts. The other thing that hurts are the comments they get from the panel of celebrities and the “Lord”, the composer Andrew Lloyd Webber. Up they get in a nice satin frock to belt out their numbers, they give it their songbird-all and then wait with heaving bosoms and shiny eyes to be told: “Sorry, I just don't rate your voice” or that their performance was “vanilla”. Worst of all, one was described as more of an understudy than a leading lady. How these girls do not slip out of their customised stilettos, take one in each hand, pad across to Lloyd Webber and gouge out his eyes on national TV I do not know. I watch it with my two boys and hate myself for it. I wonder if they are growing up to be woman-haters.

Do we judge women more quickly than men? You bet'cha. Conform or be damned. Be damned anyway for having a build like your mother in the case of Fergie's daughter Beatrice, snapped in a bikini and having the temerity to look like she ate. Be damned for having good hair or bad, for being fat or thin, for wanting to talk when the boys are already talking.

Wife in the North by Judith O'Reilly is published by Viking Penguin on July 3 (www.wifeinthenorth.com)

Violent players are no role models

Footballers are gods to small boys and impressionable teenagers. They watch them on television or from the stands. They save pocket money and stick their smiling faces into sticker books. They want to be them. Why, then, is Kevin Keegan, manager of Newcastle United, standing by his midfielder Joey Barton, who has been convicted of assault and affray?

Barton was jailed for six months after pleading guilty to attacking two people in a drunken rage in Liverpool last year. Another case is pending involving a separate alleged assault against his former Manchester City team-mate Ousmane Dabo a year ago, to which he pleads not guilty. Keegan gave a positive character reference for his player and has expressed his intention to provide “unequivocal support”.

Barton's salary is understood to be £60,000 a week, by the way. We live in a society where children kill other children with guns or knives or whatever comes to hand. Football bosses attempt to persuade us that football is a family game. They have a responsibility to the boys and young men who fill their coffers to terminate Joey Barton's contract.

Been there, Gwyneth

Gwyneth Paltrow has admitted that she was worried about being forgotten after having been more than two years away from movies. She said: “There's always somebody who's younger or hotter or prettier.” Welcome to my world, Gwyneth. I had a series of photographs taken recently. The make-up girl said: “You need to relax your forehead.” I said: “My forehead is relaxed.” Relaxed but wrinkled.

To Botox or not to Botox, that is the question. Not - where do you stop when you look in the mirror and see not your reflection but a To Do list? OK, there will always be someone younger, hotter and prettier. Just don't stand next to her.