David Willetts should know better than to tell the truth to the Guardian

Are women to blame for almost everything, as the Minister of State for Universities and Science, David Willetts, seems to think? I would not lightly discount the possibility; they can, after all, be terribly trying. They are certainly to blame for most of the bad things which have happened in my life, if you discount me as a causal factor (which you do if you are me, if you get my drift). Not only that but there seem to be more of them around at the moment, in bars and restaurants, on our television screens, driving cars all over the place or arguing interminably with cashpoint machines as the queue behind them stretches way down the high street.

Willetts, who is colloquially said to possess two brains, made his observation to the Guardian newspaper, which suggests to me that both of his brains had temporarily left his body, perhaps to attend one of those entertaining Stop The Cuts marches in central London. You can blame women for everything if you do so casually in a bar of the House of Commons and are talking either to yourself, or maybe to an elderly rural Tory backbencher who still calls Zimbabwe Rhodesia and keeps a golliwog in his constituency office. You could probably say the same thing in an interview for the Salisbury Review and get away with it (later claiming to the mainstream press that you were egregiously misquoted). But the Guardian is not the place to open a broad front in the righteous war against women. Nothing good will come of that. And indeed it didn’t.

What Willetts actually said to the Guardian was that ‘feminism’, and the entry of women into the workplace, was the single biggest factor in the present lack of jobs for men of working age.