Pot calls kettle a slag.

THE problem with women is that when something goes wrong they always blame themselves.

If it weren't for that pre-programmed insecurity we'd be running the universe, because there's nothing else to hold us back but the belief it's somehow always a woman's fault.

So we blame Maggie, and Hillary, and Diana, and Camilla, and not the idiots with testicles who cause a lot of the trouble in the first place.

That's why Stacey Giggs - whose husband Ryan cheated on her for EIGHT YEARS with the woman who went on to marry his brother, paid for her to abort their lovechild, had a fling with a celebrity bike called Imogen Thomas which led to an ill-advised superinjunction broken by the "anarchic" internet that was roundly criticised and led to weeks of front pages for the newspapers - blames the other woman rather than the dirty rat she married.

When she bumped into sister-in-law Natasha outside a restaurant Stacey screamed at her: "You're a f*cking slag!" Well yes, she is a slag, but it's her husband who betrayed her, not Natasha, who merely treated Stacey and her marriage in a way which unsisterly and stupid women have been doing since time immemorial. At least she managed to tell the truth in the end, as Ryan still writhed in his lies.

But then there's the "he's the father of her children" argument, and the "men can't help it" excuse, both of which are utter piffle and unfairly reduce men to the status of creatures with a mere physical function and ignore the fact they're also supposed to have morals, a brain and some bloody backbone.

Of course men do have a similar inbuilt flaw which stops them having too much power. It's called a penis and as soon as any chap thinks he is able to achieve a great feat - run the free world, for example, or convince his wife he's been working late - it flares up to defeat his ambitions just as effectively as women manage to screw each other over.

So I hope Stacey will not think me too unsisterly to point out that her husband is also a f*cking slag, and that seeing as she is prepared to put up with the crap dished out by a footballer who earns £80,000 a week and is worth a total of £34m then, I'm afraid, so is she.

Slag calls slag a slag for affair with slag. Well done humanity.

Take the rest of the day off.

License to grill.

IT IS to be expected that in a year which has involved Ryan Giggs, superinjunctions and a phone-hacking scandal some politician would get up on his hindlegs and blame everything on an unfettered Press.

Journalists always get the blame when they catch someone out, not least by the person who was caught. Ho-hum and fiddle-de-dee.

Already this year there's been calls for privacy laws, largely made by people who want publicity when they feel like it and secrecy when they don't. And today Shadow Culture Secretary Ivan Lewis - himself exposed by tabloids for pestering a young female aide with inappropriate texts - will tell the Labour Party Conference he wants to see licensing for journalists, with a system of "being struck off" if they're guilty of gross misconduct so they'll never work again.

Except - who's in control? Whether it's a privacy law or licensing, someone has to administer it. Someone who can draw a line in the sand which every single person in the country would agree with.

Politicians? Ooh, no thanks. We'd never know about MPs' expenses if we did that. I haven't forgotten, although they have, how many MPs excoriated the Daily Wellygraph for paying £75,000 for stolen data, criticised the 'intrusion' and urged the then-Speaker of the House of Commons to pursue court action and injunctions to plug the leak. We also wouldn't know about a dodgy dossier which took our country to war in Iraq on a lie, a Home Secretary's attempts to prosecute an Opposition MP for publicising a damaging leak about her own department, Jeffrey Archer's perjury and a million and one other stories. If a politician decided who could write the news we'd end up with a Government press release to read over our cornflakes every morning.

Judges? They'd stick to the law, surely, and be impartial. Except in the case of celebrities, privacy, superinjunctions, and stories about other judges. Lawyers are over-cautious to the nth degree and tend to err on the side of 'never publish something that someone somewhere might not like and might, with a squint and a following wind and not looking at the evidence be a little bit ripe for an old man who doesn't watch the X Factor to understand'. If a judge censored our news today's editions would be tied up in legal fannying-about until some point after Christmas and would look something like this:

Or how about the media itself? People like me with a vested interest in sticking our noses in everywhere, willy-nilly. No, probably not a good idea for us to be in sole charge either. The police could enforce censorship I suppose, but there's a few nations trying that already and I don't much fancy newspapers like they have in Saudi Arabia.

Perhaps we could ask the public? Very democratic. Except we don't want Mrs Miggins at no74 to have a say, she's a dreadful racist. And that bloke across the way, the one with the loud music and all the girlfriends, he can't be relied on. No it will have to be the bits of the public that are well-behaved, polite, dress the right way, shop in the right places, think the same way as... oh. Not so many of them, are there? And let's not forget the public voted for Hitler, the public buy Coldplay records. They cannot always be trusted.

And how do we define gross misconduct? Having to make a payment, or an apology, or being found to break the Code of Conduct? I know of dozens of stories where newspapers have paid to settle-out-of-court because it's cheaper than fighting it and budgets are tight. I've had to write apologies to someone I know, but just cannot prove, to be guilty and most hacks have fallen foul of the code at some point by genuine mistake. Some of the reporter's tricks I think are right or wrong others disagree with; one hack's gross misconduct is another's prize-winning scoop. And heaven forfend we have to start licensing every blogger who calls themselves a journalist.

When  it comes to controlling the Press there are problems with every option, flaws so bad it makes you raise your eyebrows and whistle through your teeth once you think it through. What Mr Lewis and everyone else who bangs on about Press regulation has forgotten is that we already have it.

The courts and politicians already influence what we can report. The Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984, Contempt of Court Act 1981, defamation laws, and a few words about privacy in the European Convention on Human Rights among other statutes constrict and confine the Press pretty well. The rules get pushed and tested and sometimes broken or changed; those that overstep the mark, quite rightly, get hauled before the beak to explain why and can be fined or jailed if they don't have a good reason.

The public already have a say. Up to 20million people read a tabloid newspaper every day, and millions more read our websites. If they don't like what we do they vote with their feet and their wallets, and we have to try harder. There are many reasons why the Screws of the World closed down but by far the most important is that it had lost the trust of its readers.

Last but not least there's self-regulation. The Press Complaints Commission could do with a few more teeth but editors take turns to sit on it and judge each other. There's not much room for favouritism. By far the strongest part of the system is that Fleet Street is a meritocracy - if you fail too many times you're out on your ear. If you get a reputation for costing your newspaper thousands in libel payouts you won't get another job easily. If you mire your newspaper in scandal The Editor will not look on you kindly, unless you're called Johann Hari and we've yet to see if his career survives long-term.

I do not want any one of those people to have a say in what I am able to report on or read. I want ALL of them to have a say.

It is far better to have a long, never-ending argument between everyone - a constant tug-of-war keeping the Press, politics and lawyers in check as the public throw their weight behind one or the other, forcing them all to compromise and find a way to muddle along.

It's not a perfect system, doesn't always work as it should, but what we've got right now is the best anyone's managed to come up with. Like democracy, or the Royal Family - there's plenty of flaws and fruitloops but in the end it usually evens out.

No-one's needed a licence to be a journalist in the 300 years since the first paper was printed in Fleet Street. You just have to be nosy and a little bit mad, the kind of person no-one else wants in their club. That's why politicians, judges and the public don't like us, and it's the reason why our Press with all its defects is still free.

Licences for journalists? 

What next, an exam to be Prime Minister?

R.E.S.P.E.C.T

THIS man, a footballer called Ryan, went to court demanding the British justice system, the internet and the general public respect the family life he had built with his wife Stacey and two children:

 

This woman, a model called Imogen, went to court demanding the right to defend herself against the above man's accusations, and make a buck out of his misbehaviour, after which she was subject to death threats:

Meanwhile another woman, an estate agent called Natasha, knew all along the man had been cheating on his wife for eight years with her, while simultaneously betraying his brother, called Rhodri, who she was dating at the same time and later married:

Natasha is now upset after finding out Ryan was 'cheating on her' by sleeping with Imogen, even though he was married to Stacey and Natasha was married to Rhodri, and they were both cheating on people already. "It's the worst possible betrayal," she wailed, with a total lack of irony.

All of the above people have complained about how unfair everything is and that they should be treated with more respect than they have been. And not one of them understands why they're not going to get it.

Meanwhile this woman, a mum-of-two called Leanne, has married a man called Rick without money, legs or wedding tackle after he was blown up just two years after they met online:

Leanne and Rick haven't demanded anyone's respect. They haven't complained about what's happened to them, and are campaigning for soldiers to have their sperm frozen before deployment so they can still have children if they are injured as seriously as Rick was.

They love each other, and have treated the problems life has thrown at them with a resilience which is inspiring.

Leanne said: "I have never looked at another man since the day we met. He's my hero... sometimes I have a little cry but I pick myself back up because it won't change anything... He's still the same Rick."

They know and love what's on the inside, and to them that is more important than the sort of life-changing injuries which would have made others head for the hills.

That's the kind of thing we respect, and it doesn't need to be bought or enforced by the courts. It's automatic, and given freely to those that deserve it. And it's only stuff that's free that's really worth having.

Except Ryan Giggs wouldn't understand that if you spelled it out in letters of flame a foot high on his forehead - which is something I hope his wife is giving some serious thought to.

Bad Man 1, World 0

WHILE one slightly-bad man has failed to stop people talking about his sex life, another Very Bad Man has ordered women to be raped because they don't agree with him.

We've been preoccupied with what footballers, actors, businessmen and others - some in the public interest, some less so - get up to, and the fact we're not allowed to know.

But at least we get to argue about it. This weekend, buried away at the back of a newspaper, was the news that 1,000 women, girls and boys have been raped in Misrata on the orders of officers in the Gaddafi regime, which likes being argued with even less than lawyers do.

If you can remember what fire drill at secondary school looked like, that's about 1,000 people, perhaps a little more.

In Libya there's no rape counselling. There's not much help from the justice system, and the general culture throws great shame on the victim. The fear is that many of the wives, daughters and sons who have been raped will commit suicide.

Some of the rebel fighters, feeling solidarity with the women attacked along with their city, have offered to marry them to save their lives and their families' honour.

We don't have a mandate to go to war in Libya but nor are we pushing for one. We're not arguing about it in Parliament, the Press, the courts, or even down the pub. We ought to though because it's going to happen and it looks like it's going to be messy and half-arsed.

We have bombed it from above, we have bombed it from the sea, we have blockaded its ports, we have sent in Special Forces to select targets, and now we're dispatching helicopter gunships for more selective kills. All the while the Very Bad Man has done whatever the hell he likes. How long til a boot goes on the ground? Weeks, is my bet. Probably with strict instructions not to hurt anyone.

The women of Misrata, their husbands and their dads, want decisive action from other countries who notice what's going on and think it should stop. They want to be able to speak freely, whether its about their leaders, their laws or whether they think Ryan Giggs is a twat or not.

It rather puts Imogen Thomas' "emotionally exhausted!!" claims into perspective, don't you think?

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