Roy’s been punished by PC brigade

In fact I’ll come clean and say I find a lot of it quite irritating.

As a woman I’m happy to be referred to as a chairman – just don’t call me a chair; I rather like someone holding a door open for me, and I’ll happily admit to being on the short-side as opposed to vertically challenged.

But this week it was all about political correctness in the headlines.

First it was the England manager Roy Hodgson who found himself on the wrong side of the PC line.

Apparently his crime was to tell the punchline of a joke that involved monkeys in the presence of mixed race players. The joke has, I’m told, been around for donkeys* years, and if I’m honest I have no idea what it has to do with football – I guess you had to be there. Those who were assure us it was in no way offensive. Personally that was enough for me.

But a media storm brewed nevertheless and the manager was forced to apologise and reassure the world he was absolutely not a racist – bizarrely, it would seem, by people who were also not in the dressing room at the time.

If Mr Hodgson is feeling a little wounded he can take solace that he was not the only one making the politically incorrect headlines this week.

In the House of Commons ,when heavily pregnant Equalities Minister Jo Swinson was forced to stand throughout PMQs, there was widespread criticism of her male colleagues for not offering her their seats.

But rather than agree, Miss Swinson declared it would have been sexist for them to have assumed that she was unable to stand all because she was seven months pregnant.

Perhaps as Equalities Minister she considers it her job to re-write generations of social etiquette, but I’m pretty sure there are a great many heavily pregnant women who aren’t paid to be ‘equalities ministers’ who would still like someone to offer up their seat on a packed train or bus.

(* Stephanie would like to point out that she does not believe all donkeys to be old, and regrets any offence that her comments may have caused to donkeys.)