A BUNCH OF divorced dads wearing Santa costumes drinking in a City pub were more likely to be contemplating the hollow, lonely, fractious travesty of a family Christmas that lay ahead than plotting to kidnap the Prime Minister’s youngest child. But it is a mark of Fathers 4 Justice’s bankrupt reputation that one could imagine the bad Santas scaling the No 10 walls, snatching Leo from his climbing frame and holding him hostage on some high ledge before the world’s media — just a logical progression from the Buckingham Palace Batman via the selfless political activist who handcuffed himself to Margaret Hodge.

Matt O’Connor, the founder, was right to close down F4J before the attention-seekers and misogynists that he never could control devised some ghastly grand finale for real. But I hope that Mr O’Connor retrenches, takes time to consider how his organisation could be reborn: less a magnet for those twisted and deluded men who make you want to draw your own kids closer, but a broader movement. One that would be supported not just by divorced dads but those still in loving marriages. And, crucially, by women who are less sexually partisan than F4J members might think. Call it Justice 4 Fathers, perhaps.

Because it is society, not just families, that needs fathers: the single greatest social catastrophe of the past 30 years is the increasing absence of men from their children’s lives. From this stems every type of antisocial behaviour on Tony Blair’s respect agenda, each failing school and violent teenage gang. (I’d bet that Thomas ap Rhys Pryce’s killers were fatherless boys.) Just knowing how much I need my own husband to discipline our testosterone-soaked sons, how hard they listen and crave his approval, I feel for any woman trying to a mould a young man alone.

But F4J has emphasised the flipside of modern fatherhood, the new breed of diligent hands-on dads, who — it argues — are evicted from family homes and estranged from their beloved kids by flaky, grasping, irrational bitches. Who could not sympathise with a father who has spent thousands on legal fees to win pitiful access visits only to discover, if a spiteful partner cancels his Sunday in the park with his little girl, that the justice system will not do a thing?

Yet in portraying mothers as the enemy and the family courts as a state-sanctioned feminist tribunal, F4J not only attracted the kind of wife-bashing psychos that women rightly keep away from their kids, but absolved men of all blame. F4J chose to ignore the demonstrable truth that many absent dads never had any intention of raising their kids or that contact breaks down because a man gets a new girlfriend or just want to enjoy his new-found pub-and-footie singledom. It has focused a few anomalies in the Child Support Agency system rather than admit that the £3 billion Britain’s men owe their own children is a stain upon their sex.

The negligence of many fathers undermines F4J’s insistence that 50:50 custody should be the accepted norm: if these men bore even a 25:75 share at home, maybe they wouldn’t now be in a bare saddo bedsit. And is the divine right to hoik a child constantly between two households a demand made by a parent with its best interests at heart?

A reborn F4J needs to acknowledge and then lambast deadbeat dads, to define the duties and obligations of fathers as well as their rights. And they should stop being angry, since male anger in discussions of young children is utterly self-defeating. They ought to lose not only the novelty Tony Blair masks and lame superhero costumes but their official merchandise too: the F4J logoed hooded rain-jacket belongs in a slasher move; T-shirts that say “I’m the Daddy” make me think of a bullying criminal gangleader, not dear old Pops.

True, female emotional and economic independence has led many women to wonder whether a feckless, grumbling, mess-making male is worth having around. But banging your fist on the table for your dinner isn’t going to turn back time. Seven in ten divorces are initiated by unhappy women: if men want to stay in the family tent, they are going to have to change. It might not take much: research by City University published this week concluded, simply, that female happiness = work + family + a man who helps to do the laundry.

Yet it is not just about blurring old roles, making men into Mr Mums. The traditional qualities men brought to family life — strength, discipline, guidance, a passing on of skills — are ignored or demeaned. Now that the CSA finally has the power to chase errant dads through the Inland Revenue or via debt-collecting agencies, so must mothers be penalised if, for no good reason, they keep fathers away from their kids. Dads may not be superheroes but they are much more than walking wallets.

janice.turner@thetimes.co.uk

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