Colonel Richard Kemp set the ladies aflutter by suggesting that they didn’t have the ‘natural killer instinct’ of men and thus shouldn’t be allowed to serve on the front line in direct combat roles.

I am not convinced that men have a ‘natural killer instinct’ – if they had, there would not be the need for ‘square bashing’ to ensure that they follow orders to rush forward and insert a bayonet into the guts of the man the other side of the road purely because they have been told to. Nor would they need to be taught precisely how hard to insert the bayonet, and how to twist it from side to side to ensure that brown skinned entrails are ‘eliminated’ in the pursuit of oil to keep our homes centrally-heated. Perhaps I have been lucky in the men I have known, even the ones I divorced, but they would have instinctively replied – ‘get a wood-burning stove’ – rather than have to disembowel a total stranger, or even a cockroach, to keep the home fires burning.

Since we live on an island, we don’t have the need to protect fluid borders from marauding tribes in the same way that other Europeans do. We habitually ‘cross the water’ in order to fight battles – far too frequently for my taste. Of course we still need a defence force, if only to protect ourselves from those who would also cross the water to fight their battles. We will always have a need for a few individuals who are trained in the unnatural art of professionally killing another human being simply because they have been told to.

I used to be good friends with the (then) Base psychiatrist at an American air base. He spent his working life trying to un-pickle the contretemps in the minds of men who were expected by day to be ruthless professionals who could drain the blood from a man’s jugular vein with one swipe of their knife, on a given order – and then go home to be berated by a typical American wife and demanding children, put down the dinner knife (quietly) and mildly respond ‘Yes, of course dearest, anything you say Dear” when provoked.

After five years, he gave up the unequal struggle and retired to the simpler task of teaching Florida ladies how to eat less if they wanted to lose weight…

Should we not be posing the question ‘why are we still obsessed with teaching men how to be professional killers’ rather than the current question which seems to be ‘if women want to disembowel foreign gentlemen, shouldn’t we be letting them’? I am quite alarmed that there exist any women who really want to contort their faces and rush forward with a bayonet, yelling blood curdling threats, in order to perform a colostomy without anaesthetic on another individual because a) they’ve been told to, and b) he’s wearing different clothes to them. If such women do exist, shouldn’t we be locking them up somewhere, rather than paying them to live out their fantasies?

Particularly since in the same breath we are told that women are such delicate creatures that Theresa May is to rush through legislation this week to ensure that men who subject them to ‘psychological abuse’ – not giving them sufficient reassurance to the age old question of ‘does my bum look big in this’? – are to be liable for a 14 year prison sentence.

Blimey! – and what does this delicate flower say when she meets a suicide bomber at the gates of Camp Bastion saying ‘Does my bomb look big in this’? To disembowel or disenfranchise – that is the question.

Feminists are in danger of becoming toxic schizophrenics (some would say, have already become so) unable to decide whether to be professional vulnerable victims, or professional venerable killers.

It is the same fate that has befallen ‘children’ – or teenagers as they used to be known before the term fell out of favour. On the one hand they are children until 18, who ‘should be able to’ chose an MP to run the country, but cannot ‘chose’ to send a naked selfie to their new found friend, and on the other hand – turn into a 12 year old systematically described as a ‘young man‘ by Sky news this morning, when they get shot for waving a fake gun at a police officer….

Let’s have a vote on women as professional ‘hand to hand’ killers…..