We know from Big Brother that today’s young ladies have replaced their appealing thongs with pants the size of spinnakers, and now comes news that the sales of stockings are in free fall. Down from £10m sales in 2002 to £5m in 2006.

According to The Sun’s woman editor – as opposed to the real editor, who’s a woman – this is because girls have better things to do these days than get dressed up like a Parisian hooker every time they go to the shops.

I absolutely understand that. Getting dressed in the morning is something that should never take more than 20 seconds and putting on a pair of stockings and suspenders can take anything up to three hours.

Actually this is only a guess, based on how long it takes me to undo a suspender belt. Even when I’m armed with a head torch and a pair of scissors.

Anyway, I fully appreciate that in a postMrs Robinson world, where women work and raise children, stockings are to the wardrobe what the quill is to online banking.

But here’s the thing, girls. Tell us that you won’t wear stockings because they are impractical and you may well find that we’ll give up as well.

At the moment we tend not to pick our noses when in your company because it is a bit slovenly. But if you’re going to slob around in a pair of footless tights and a sack, then you won’t mind if we bury an index finger in each of our nostrils and dig away.

I was at London’s City airport this morning surrounded by a group of middle-aged chaps who, I presume, were going to Scotland to watch some golfists.

At home, each of these men would, I’m sure, eat all their yoghurt and pretend to be interested in Victoria Beckham’s opinion on interior design.

But at the airport, with no wives and girlfriends to keep them in check, they quickly reverted to type. By 7.45am they were on their third pint and as I boarded my plane, I believe they were beginning a farting competition.

This is not a criticism. I recently spent a couple of weeks camping in Africa with 20 or so other men and you wouldn’t believe how neanderthal we became. Or how quickly.

Every morning would begin with a conversation about who’d been for their number twos, what the number twos had looked like, what they’d smelt of, how much more there was to come, and whether any records for sheer tonnage had been set.

Then we’d move on to who’d crept into whose tent the night before, what it had felt like, and how long, if we were the last 20 people on earth, it might take for one us to sleep with James May.

You might argue that your husband is not like this, but I assure you that beneath the veneer you see at home, he is. He may do the washing up and take the children to the park, but when you’re not around, he’s like the light in a fridge. He’s a completely different animal, obsessed with bottoms, buggery and belching.

So, girls, do you want that sort of thing at home? Really? No? Well get down to the petrol station then and buy some bloody stockings.

You may say that tights are practical and warm but have you seen what they do to a bank robber’s face? And hold-ups won’t do either. Thanks to all that elasticated rubber, they ruin the shape of your thighs and, in all probability, cut off the blood supply to your feet, causing gangrene. And no man fancies a girl, no matter how sparkling her eyes and wit might be, if she is gangrenous.

Pop socks, meanwhile, would be completely banned if I were in power. And anyone found wearing them would be made to parade in nothing else through their local town, and then shot.

It must be stockings, with a suspender belt, because what this combination does is mask everything that doesn’t matter and lay bare everything that does. A picture is nice, but before you hang it on the wall it needs a frame.

And apart from anything else, if you flash your stocking tops at a man you can, and I mean this literally, get him to do anything you want. Unless you have the figure of a bison obviously, in which case he won’t do anything at all. Because he will be too busy being sick.

Assuming, however, you have legs which clearly belong on a human, you only need let a man know you’re wearing stockings and you will be empowered to a point you may have thought impossible.

I honestly believe that if David Milibandilegs really wanted to solve this Russian crisis, he could simply ask Rene Russo to reenact that scene from the remake of The Thomas Crown Affair and Putin would have the Litvinenko murder suspect on the next flight to London.

And please, let’s not have any of this “ooh, stockings make us sex objects” nonsense because that simply isn’t true.

We all saw Sharon Stone cross her legs in Basic Instinct and we all tittered in a schoolboy way. But when Rene popped a stockinged leg from that split skirt, I damn nearly fainted with admiration at the size of her brain.

Plainly she’d worked out that what she really needed to gain control over the entire New York police department was not a degree from Harvard. But a pair of £4.99 stockings from Pretty Polly. That makes her smart. As well.

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