I've cut and pasted the awful article. I do read the DM online sometimes but this and Liz Jone's calling Rihanna's outfits "rape inducing" really takes the biscuit.
Calm down! Saatchi's no monster and Nigella's no battered wife
The time has come for all this to stop. The nation has thoroughly, if rather disgracefully, enjoyed itself by gossiping about Charles Saatchi and Nigella Lawson for quite long enough. We have pored over every ugly picture ? and ugly they certainly were ? and we have gaped and gasped to our national heart?s content.
But what began as graphic titillation has started to smell altogether too much like a witch-hunt: a frenzy of speculation that is becoming as unseemly as it is unfair.
Charles Saatchi is being portrayed worldwide as a wife-beating monster on the basis of scant, if any, evidence.
Nigella Lawson, famously her own woman and a goddess to boot, is being characterised as a pathetic victim of domestic violence ? which, try as I might, I just don?t buy.
Saatchi is indeed a volatile and physical man. Always has been. Back in the days when he began to make his millions in advertising, there were tales of him hurling items of furniture around the office like so many missiles, the better to ease any fleeting frustration.
We know, now, that he is pretty darned physical with his wife, too ? far more so than you or I might find acceptable if we had married him. Heaven knows, I wouldn?t want my throat grasped Saatchi-style, or my nose ?tweaked?.
Nevertheless, to put such unpleasantness into the catch-all basket called ?domestic violence? is to do grave disservice not just to this couple but also to the real victims of real horrors that happen daily behind closed doors.
Of course I condemn physical violence by men against women and, for that matter, by women against men. But there is no reason to believe that Charles Saatchi, though he may have a volcanic temperament, has ever hurt his wife.
Indeed, it is telling that his previous wife, Kay ? though no fan of his, this woman scorned ? has gone out of her way in recent days to defend him on that score. Ill-tempered, yes. Controlling, yes.
Violent, never.
Nor is there reason to believe that Nigella Lawson fits the mould of the battered wife. I do not pretend to know her well, but we worked on the same newspaper many years ago and I found her perfectly affable, quietly ambitious and wholly able to stand on her own two feet.
Her first husband, John Diamond, I knew much better, and of this I am sure: he was not a man likely to have been charmed by a dormouse.
In short, there is nothing about Nigella that puts her in the class of subjugated woman. She has no need of Saatchi?s money, being worth many millions herself.
She is not without a place to run to should she choose to leave ? her family is loaded, loving and influential ? and the idea that Saatchi has somehow managed to strip her of self-esteem and independent thought is frankly laughable.
The truth about their very public quarrel is that only two people know exactly what happened, that they are never going to tell us, and that claims of an ?assault? lasting a full 27 minutes are, after all, only the claims of a paparazzo with pictures to sell.
All that the rest of us know, from seeing his pictures, is that at any point Nigella could have reached for her bag and left ? yet chose not to do so.
And from another picture taken on another day, we know that the pair returned to the same table at the same restaurant a week later, which hardly suggests lingering trauma.
Saatchi accepted a police caution ? but that, likely as not, was a joint decision taken in the vain hope of damage limitation. She left the family home ? but that, too, was probably a joint decision taken to protect their children?s privacy.
How they live is surely their choice. It is their marriage, after all. Yet still the court of public opinion will not let the matter rest.
It has even reached the stage where a marital tiff has become fodder for party political point-scoring. Nick Clegg says that if he?d been there he would not have intervened; Ed Miliband and Lord Kinnock both say they would ? so nul points for the Libs and hurrah for the Labs, even if Nigella would no doubt have been first to tell the chivalrous creeps where to shove their ?intervention?.
I do wonder, though, whether Messrs Miliband and Kinnock would be as quick to reach for the shining armour had the ?assault? happened the other way around. Had Nigella shoved her fingers up the Saatchi beak ? do you think, then, they would have thought it any of their business?
No, me neither.
And it does happen the other way around. My guess is that if Nigella had been photographed slapping Saatchi?s face it would have been a two-day wonder in which she would have emerged as the heroine.
Indeed, mea culpa, I once entertained a packed and costly restaurant when I flung a large glass of vino over a companion?s head, and all I got as I stalked out were admiring winks from fellow diners.
A critical difference, of course, is that the cultural mindset is these days so feminised that the automatic presumption in my case was that the man must have done something to deserve it (in my case he had, but never mind) while in the Saatchi debacle the equally automatic presumption has been that Nigella is a ?victim
Why? Because she?s a woman. It is both a marvel and a sadness that what, barely a generation ago, was a vibrant movement of women jumping up and down to yell about their strengths has dissipated into a perpetual whimper about poor little us, victims all.
Victims of harassment, victims of discrimination, victims of husbands, victims of men.
Everybody is in on it: the police, the courts, the law-makers and, as we?ve seen here, even the politicians rush to join in.
Should a woman have any manner of altercation with a man, she is instantly labelled ?victim? until and unless his innocence is proved ? the opposite of the way our trusty system has traditionally and properly worked.
Some women, of course, need our help and protection, and it is to our credit that increasing awareness and resources are poured in where necessary.
Nonetheless, to confer the title of ?victim? where it is not warranted ? and it is hard to think of a better example than that of Nigella Lawson ? is worse than patronising; it is actually insulting.
I might feel slightly sorry for Charles Saatchi, insofar as the response to his behaviour, beastly and boorish as it undoubtedly was, has painted him far blacker than is probably appropriate.
But I feel a great deal more sorry for Nigella. Not because of what he did ? she?ll take or leave that and make decisions about her marriage as she sees fit ? but because she has become the subject of such prurience.
From the day those pictures reached the Sunday newsstands, all the hard-won, well-deserved admiration she has enjoyed for years for being a strong, independent woman faded to nothing in a tidal wave of public pity. And that, I?ll bet, hurts a lot more than her nose.