Speaking to an audience of wimmin in Glasgow last week, Mrs Blair revealed that back at the start of her husband’s career he was told by Labour party officials that he wouldn’t get very far if he kept going home at 7pm to see his wife and children.

Cherie’s message was clear. Men should spend quality time with their family no matter how many wars they’ve inadvertently started and no matter how many constables are knocking on the door wanting to know about cash for ermine.

I’m sorry but I don’t understand. If you were an Iron Age man and you came home from a hunting expedition empty-handed because you wanted to play with your children, you’d starve. If you were a penguin and you came back from a fishing trip with nothing but snow in your flippers, your baby would die and the following year Mrs Penguin would find a new mate.

This is the problem. I am designed to kill foxes, bend every woman I meet over the nearest piece of furniture and give her a damn good seeing-to.

But in an evolutionary nanosecond, it’s all changed. After several million years of programming we’ve been told that what women really want is a husband who leaves his colleagues in the lurch at 7pm and comes home to make a delicious quiche.

That’s like telling your faithful family toaster after a lifetime spent making toast that you want it to become a washing machine. And it’s not just a bunch of baggy-breasted feminists making the point either. It’s every single girl from the age of puberty to the menopause.

Last weekend my colleague James May hurt his wrist while performing a stunt at the MPH show in London. Being male, mostly, he shrugged it off and kept going, which caused all the backstage women to treat him like a leper.

If he’d wanted to impress them he should have abandoned the show, gone home, sold his heartwarming story to OK! magazine, and spent the next six weeks watching Love Actually with his cat.

I pride myself on the fact I don’t cry over films — apart from Educating Rita, obviously. But apparently this is all wrong. I should sob hopelessly every time I watch the news.

No, really. Look at the film stars who melt the hearts of womankind these days: Johnny Depp, Judy Law, Orlando Bloom. Are they hunter-gatherers? Maybe they’d pass muster on a Saturday morning in Carluccio’s but in a jungle they’d be eaten within 10 minutes.

Back in the 1960s Paul Newman and Robert Redford were much loved as they trotted around Wyoming on their horses shooting people. But when they were reunited last week, women forgot all that and in a desperate bid to justify the stirring they felt 40 years ago, talked about how Paul has been married to the same woman for a million years and how he makes a lovely sauce.

I wonder sometimes if Steve McQueen would get a break if he appeared on the scene today. Back in the Sixties he really did seem to have all the bases covered: silent but strong smouldering sexuality, the sort of man who could punch a horse to the ground while driving a Mustang sideways through the streets of San Francisco. He even managed to get Faye Dunaway’s knickers off just by playing chess.

Who’s his modern-day equivalent? There’s nobody. Stallone has disappeared. Schwarzenegger is in politics. Gibson is setting fire to synagogues. And now we’re expected to believe that a dwarf like Tom Cruise could knock someone out with a single blow from his hair product.

It’s the same story in music. Robert Plant used to send women wild with that lion’s mane hairdo and half a mile of hosepipe down the front of his loons. But now everyone in music is a doe-eyed pretty boy with a Ken and Barbie androgeno-crotch and nothing up his nose except moisturiser.

I work with Richard Hammond, who is about as manly as Graham Norton’s knicker drawer. But girls say he has bunny-rabbit eyes and that he looks like he needs to be mothered. Pah. He looks like a Smurf.

In sport, women seem to love overpaid nancy-boy footballers who fall over all the time and cry, whereas proper men who play rugby and keep going even when their head has fallen off are largely ignored.

I’ll tell you this, though, Mrs Blair. If you were a penguin looking for a mate, you’d go for Steve Thompson in front of Colin Firth any day.

All of which gets me back to the case in point; that after a million years of not coming home until you actually have an impala to eat, men are now being told by the prime minister’s wife that no matter what, we should up sticks at seven and go home with a box of tissues and something gooey from Belgium.

Right. So when the director says that he needs a few more shots and I say “tough” and drive off, that’s okay is it? It’s okay that the BBC spends thousands of pounds of your money getting everyone back the next day because Jeremy wanted to get home and read his children a Winnie-the-Pooh story?

Cherie says my attitude is macho and she’s right.

It is.

It might not be very attractive in this day and age. But that’s because I’m a man. I know this because I much prefer Uma Thurman, who’s all woman, to Kate Moss who, from behind, could well be a boy.

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