Do not bother holding the front page: scientists have come a step closer to perfecting the male contraceptive Pill.

Oh, why don’t they save their Petri dishes for something more useful? Like, say, developing acne cream for frogs? Male birth control just won’t work. Men cannot be trusted to change their underwear regularly, never mind take a tablet. And even if they do, no one would believe them. A drunken man at 3am whispering: “It’s OK, love – I’m on the Pill” into a woman’s ear is about as likely to pull as John McCririck.

Women have learnt from experience that men will do anything for a shag. They are programmed to spread their seed, so they will lie that they are single, that they are MI6 agents, that their granny has just died, if it means getting their end away. And look at what the male Pill does: it suppresses a hormone in the brain to wipe out sperm count. Tests on rats show that it shrinks the prostate. Oh yes, we can see men just queueing up to fire blanks with dwarfed nether regions.

Carl Djerassi, the original engineer of the female Pill, says that few companies are interested in producing a male Pill because “men care more about preserving their virility . . . than about sparing their partner an unintended pregnancy”. One hates to be cynical but some men worry more about recording Match of the Day than they do about an unintended pregnancy.

So maybe another new development – spray-on condoms – is the answer. The technology consists of a “spray can into which the man inserts his penis”.

OK, so how long before a man falls in love with his spray can?

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