What shall we do with our young women, do you suppose? Two surveys out last week suggest they are increasingly prone to acts of criminal violence and, worse, have become among fattest girls in Europe. This follows earlier surveys which indicated that they are also the most stupid, ill-mannered, flatulent, drug-addicted and sexually incontinent girls in Europe. Perhaps as a consequence of this, they are the girls with whom Europe’s men would least like to have sexual intercourse. Also perhaps as a consequence, the girls with whom most of Europe’s men have already enjoyed sexual congress. British girls are a cinch, although not, it would seem, a very desirable cinch.

The obesity business is puzzling; I find it hard to believe that British girls are more grotesquely obese than, say, their Austrian counterparts. I saw a gaggle of Austrian girls making their way to school recently and thought at first that it was a queue for auditions for the Viennese stage version of Babe. It may be the case that British girls are on average fatter but that the statistics are skewed by the huge number of very thin Austrian girls locked away in cellars. Who knows? The criminal violence stuff is a worry, too; there has been a 25% rise in cases of female wrongdoing and a dramatic increase in girls kicking each others’ heads in, or stabbing one another. The gender roles have been reversed: these days it is the boys who shriek from the sidelines, “Leave ’er, Minette, she ain’t wurf it,” as the blows rain down. The “ladette” culture of the 1990s has been blamed for this development, but I am not sure this entirely explains the phenomenon.

In both cases it’s more likely a result of the law of unintended consequences. For a long time now we have been told that it is important not to stigmatise fat people - and especially fat girls - in case we traumatise them. But the point is that unless we upset them by calling them lard-arses, there is no incentive for the girls to remain thin. They may as well eat up that KFC party bucket with supersize fries because no social ill will befall them as a consequence. Remove the stigma and what you get is huge pasty-skinned porkers, each armed with a Stanley knife.

Similarly, for years feminists told us that women were constrained by society to behave in an inhibited and modest manner in public; this, we were told, was a bad thing - the product of an inherently sexist society. Well, the change has come; these days they waddle drunkenly from Wetherspoons to the kebab house, pausing only to vomit, stab a friend and engage in a desultory act of love in a shop doorway.

This is presumably the sunlit upland that 1970s feminists would entirely approve of. Fat, remember, is a feminist issue; so is the right to act like a bloke.

-Tour companies may well whack a surcharge on your summer holiday this year because of “the strong euro and, er, expensive fuel”. On the BBC news yesterday they interviewed a little monkey from some organisation which represents travel agents – I missed her name, probably Karen Goebbels, or something – who said that these surcharges were “important” because – and get this – “they protect our customers”.

She reminded me of the woman from the Post Office interviewed on the Today programme a few years back who said they intended to stop second deliveries “in order to improve our service to the customer”. And the spokesbint from one of the hopeless train franchises who announced that they would be ripping out the seats on some commuter routes “in order to enhance passenger comfort”. Presumably there is some sort of media training institute somewhere in the country which schools perfectly normal people in the art of spewing out this sort of disingenuous rubbish without so much as batting an eyelid.

Meanwhile, if anyone anywhere has ever booked and paid for a holiday and then later had the tour company ring up and say, “the pound is very strong at the moment so we’re giving you back a couple of hundred quid”, I’d be interested to know.

Barack’s left with a sour taste

When is it permissible to call an American woman an affectionate diminutive – such as sweetie, honey lamb-chop, sugar-pumpkin toes or pretzel-breath? The future of the free world depends on your answer.

Presidential candidate Barack Obama deflected an unsolicited question from a female hack by calling his interlocutor “sweetie” – and as a consequence the USA is in uproar, the most angry it has been since the Tet offensive. You don’t call middle-class women that, unless you are looking to be peremptorily spayed, without anaesthetic. Obama has apologised, of course.

His detractors, though, have suggested that this is evidence of his inherent misogyny, which, frankly, they’d suspected all along. Others – conservatives, mainly – have suggested that he was just being nice and that calling the awful woman “sweetie” was preferable to ignoring her altogether, which really would have been misogyny.

Somewhere between these two poles, the rest of us, men of a certain age, flail around ineffectually, not quite knowing which side to back; not certain if we should chivalrously hold the door open, or in the modern manner, let it slam straight back in the face.

Bad case of Night Fever at No 10

So Gordon Brown is a fan of the Bee Gees and believes their music to be “timeless” – in much the same way, I would imagine, that tuberculosis is “timeless”. One of the castrati disco-lite trio, Robin Gibb, has revealed that How Deep is Your Love? is on the prime minister’s iPod. So the one thing Gordon had going for him – our perception of a high-minded and serious individual – is undermined and we are forced to imagine him in a white suit dancing, à la Travolta, to Night Fever.

Politicians – here are 10 things not to do: (1) never wear a baseball cap; (2) never tell Piers Morgan how many women you’ve shagged; (3) never be photographed dancing at the Notting Hill carnival; (4) never attempt to excuse a sexual indiscretion by claiming you were worried about going bald; (5) never wear a Chelsea strip when playing away from home; (6) never have sex at Balmoral, even if you’re sure the Queen is asleep; (7) never put a pointless eco-friendly device on the roof of your house; (8) no matter how irritating someone might be, never have their dog shot dead; (9) don’t let your wife tell people you like it five times a night; and (10) never, ever, tell anyone what music you enjoy, unless it’s Thomas Tallis or Mozart.

- Part 349 of the increasingly popular series Why You Should Never Shop at Tesco. Store bosses have decided that customers who arrive at the checkout with children in tow will not be allowed to buy alcohol, in case they give the alcohol to the children later rather than drink it themselves. So here is your starter for 10: Tesco is acting out of a sense of corporate responsibility and moral conscience, worried by the rise of teenage binge drinking. Or Tesco is acting on a fatuous directive dreamt up by some pious, hypocritical monkey in its PR department.

Sheesh. Hard one to call, isn’t it?

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