Oh, what would we do without Melanie Phillips, the Daily Mail's matriarch of all moralisers, the grumpy woman who has transformed fury into an art form?
When a story such as the three teenage mothers living with their mother, Julie Atkins, and their babies in a council house in Derby arrives in all its grotesque glory, you can rely on Ms Phillips: it helps to know, then you'll know you're not thinking what she's thinking.
In case you've given up buying the Mail because it is so horrible, let me remind you. Ms Phillips crowns Ms Atkins as the worst mother in the world.
And more - she's the index of how this great, rich, powerful country is collapsing; she's bad because she's irresponsible, blaming everyone for her daughters' fate; she presides over a 'baby factory'; she represents parental tolerance and the scourge of sex education.
Ms Phillips puts it like this: the Atkins family exemplifies 'generations of female-only households which think they can do without fathers, the greatest single cause of "yob" culture and the breakdown of civility and order.' She invokes the Victorians - really, she does! - for 'remoralising' society. Promiscuity should be considered as a cause for removing children, and instead of 'dishing out flats and benefits', the authorities should send these girls to 'mother and baby homes'.
Sure, Julie Atkins is disastrous, but that's because she's weak. Sure, she's failed her daughters, because she hasn't offered them any model other than motherhood.
This story doesn't confirm the evil of sex education in promoting promiscuity -rather, it exposes the ignorance that made these girls reckless. It exposes what happens when women are weak, when they seek power through someone with more power, a man, and when they seek purpose through someone with less power -a baby.
The fathers are, as usual, beyond scrutiny, because pessimism prevails about men. They're beasts, they're predators, they're hopeless. But they are also beyond blame - because mothers are to blame for the bad behaviour of men.
The Phillips template shares this grave pessimism about masculinity, and at the same time it recoils from a critique of the patriarchal values that make some men so mad, or bad, or merely useless.
Ms Phillips thinks that what women need is men. I expect the Atkins girls agree. Actually what they really need is a strong mother. And they need to discover their own strength.
