Just occasionally this column likes to put its head between its knees, take deep breaths and think the unthinkable. And the unthinkable this week is: have we now reached the point when it is actually possible to feel sorry for Lembit Öpik? Obviously, the instinctive answer is “no, not even when Hell freezes over”. Öpik is a monumental self-publicist seemingly locked in a permanent mid-life crisis who looks like a lopsided garden gnome, yet somehow still pulls the birds and has flaunted his 25 year-old Cheeky Girl fiancée - a woman whose idea of dressing down is to wear hotpants while inviting all and sundry to “touch my bum” - like a cat flaunts a dead mouse.

When he proposed to Gabriela Irimia in Rome, the special moment was shared with Hello! magazine. Worse, he recently appeared on Big Brother's Little Brother, which would normally draw a line under any sympathy I might proffer.

But, and I hate to say this, Öpik is now more sinned against than sinning. This week, for the second time this year, he fell victim to the kiss-and-sell - that very modern betrayal that (and I hate to say this, too) women use to stitch up men much more than men use to stitch up women. On both occasions the dirt-dishers were not random floozies but his exfiancées, both of whom finished with him, not vice versa. One of them, the weather girl Siân Lloyd, who famously battled constipation on I'm a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here, knocked out a sneery book telling all about Öpik's failings faster than you could say “pass the Ex-Lax”.

Now it is Gabriela's turn to “open her heart” to the papers. When the MP for Montgomeryshire picked up his News of the World this weekend he learned for the first time that a) he had made Gabriela pregnant and b) she miscarried the baby. “I know Lembit will be shocked reading this today. I just couldn't tell him any other way,” said the Cheeky Girl, bafflingly and still wearing her engagement ring. Yes, a text message seems so impersonal and yet a phone call perhaps too personal. Probably best to break it to him via the biggest selling newspaper in the English language then, eh?

Öpik has, in fact, been admirably quiet about both these break-ups - even when Lloyd accused him of being a sulky, selfish, unreliable tightwad. “I have no interest in engaging in any kind of dialogue about her or her book,” he said recently, with a restraint lacking in his ex-wives-to-be.

Why do so many women do this grubby stuff so readily? Study the pages of any Sunday paper and you'll see that female kiss-and-tells outnumber male ones by about ten to one. There's the money, obviously, and that male readers like seeing suspender-clad girlies stretched across a double page spread bleating: “My celebrity lover made me feel so cheap and used when I let him have sex with me every Monday, Wednesday and Friday.” Men are generally more powerful - and libidinous - than women so this is a quick way for the female to get even. And if a footballer must gorge himself on every passing “slapper” then arguably he deserves to read all about it in the red tops.

But what when they're not “slappers”, but intelligent, independent women who risk being tainted just as much as the husbands that they're dissing? No matter how much he undoubtedly made her suffer with his infidelity, how did Ingrid, ex-wife of Chris Tarrant, think it would help to tell the world that the father of her children needed Viagra to “get it up”, had poor personal hygiene and often came to bed “reeking of fish”? For that interview in The Sun, she didn't even get paid.

There used to be a clear demographic - it was the desperate Page 3 wanabes who had been s*** on by famous married men who would dish the dirt in return for a bit of cash. Now everyone, even those who don't need money and are famous already, seem to need to peel their souls in print, make their pain ultra-visible. But does it really, ultimately, empower the impotent?

Margaret Cook, ex-wife of the late Robin Cook, who was dumped for his mistress and took revenge by hardback, thinks it does. She regards it as a feminist act. “I see this trend as part of the democratising process, part of the march of feminism,” she wrote earlier this year when commenting on Cécilia Sarkozy's attempts to publish a book about her ex-husband. “Icons are tumbled from their pedestals, feet of clay exposed. It is in everyone's interest that those males with monster egos and the behaviour that goes with them should be cut down to size.”

Maybe, but often it isn't just the men with the monster egos. Throughout her book, Siân Lloyd seems unaware that she comes across as more self-satisfied than Öpik (she reminds us on the dust jacket that she got a first at Cardiff University). Near the end of the 283-page tome she writes, apparently without irony: “I am a public figure but a private person.”

Meanwhile, Gabriela's mother and manager, Margit, boasts that Gabriela is “more famous” than Öpik and it was she who boosted his profile, not the other way round. Yet even she, who gleefully told the press she had circled on a calendar the date that Gabriela first slept with Öpik, says her daughter was wrong to talk to the News of the World about her miscarriage. “It is not beneficial for her personal life and it is not beneficial for her work.”

I'm with Margit here. It's not that women should always stay quiet and never take revenge, it's just that they should know that sometimes it smacks less of female empowerment and more of me, me, me attention-seeking. Which is often precisely what they claim to despise about their men. And the final, maddening own-goal is that Öpik emerges as the more likeable character.

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