WHY do we expect political wives to be so dumb? Ffion Hague is drifting through this election campaign, a dutiful three steps behind her husband, looking good, smiling sweetly and saying absolutely nothing. Cherie Blair has only just stopped a similar trick - alternating with hanging on to her husband's arm for dear life and looking adoring.

It's an insult to their intelligence and certainly an insult to ours. To watch them in action, smiling and simpering, you'd think they had hardly a brain cell between them. Blair and Hague might just as well have a cardboard cut-out with them. Yet they are both fiendishly intelligent women, highly educated and high earning and with no doubt plenty of strong opinions, which, because they are ambitious for their husbands, they carefully keep to themselves in public.

Which is why, I hope, they have a lot more to say when they get home. After he'd thumped that protestor, John Prescott was judged harshly, mocked mercilessly in all the newspapers and news media. Hurtful and humiliating for him no doubt - but I bet that was nothing compared to what Pauline had to say to him.

Three years after their divorce, Margaret Cook is still having a public go at Robin, saying things that she would have said in private in their life together.

Listening to Sir Ted Heath being typically curmudgeonly and pompous on the radio the other morning, I couldn't help thinking how much better his career and his image could have been if he'd had a wife who could have put him in his place occasionally, laughed at him even. And as for Peter Mandelson.

Laura Bush is credited with getting George Dubya off the bottle and onto the straight and narrow. You can be sure she didn't do that just be smiling sweetly.

It is, of course, a tricky path to tread. Glenys Kinnock had opinions of her own and everyone called her the real leader of the Labour Party. It was the same with Hillary Clinton. So maybe Ffion's not so daft after all.

But let's hope, that when she gets William home she gives him the benefit of her wisdom - loud and clear, no messing, mincing or beating about the bush.

In a world full of spin doctors, sycophants and hangers on, every politician needs someone not afraid to tell it like it is. And as far as our leaders are concerned, that's what wives are for.

GNER Back on Track say the big posters at Darlington Railway Station. I know, because I had plenty of time to look at them when my friend's train was nearly an hour late last week.

Back on track maybe, but still going very, very slowly.

HAVE you seen where the polygamist Tom Green lives? He, his five wives and 29 children live in a cluster of caravans in the Utah desert, two hours from the nearest shop. It must be an extremely strange and inward-looking world, isolated from the rest of society. In the most advanced country in the world, they are as nearly as removed from the rest of us as Amazonian Indians.

American courts have found Green guilty of four charges of polygamy and he will be sentenced next month. But are we in any position to judge his lifestyle?

Considering the way we cope with relationships - affairs, divorce, deserted mothers and babies - it's tricky to see how we can really criticise polygamy if everyone living in this family unit is happy with their lot. It's really no weirder than some of the great gatherings of families step families and half families where you can spend entire weddings wondering who is related to whom and how.

But, the bit that causes real concern is the youth of his wives. His first was only 13 at the time of her marriage. These are girls who are too young to know what's going on, too narrowly educated to be aware of another way of living, too isolated to know what other options there might be. Maybe, the young girls should be sent away to schools in big towns at the age of ten or so. Then, when they're 18, if they want to come back to a fifth share of a middle-aged man on welfare in a caravan in a desert, they should be allowed to do so.

But how many of them, having seen the chance of another life, do you think would actually make that choice?

SORRY, lovie, but it's the best thing that could have happened to breast cancer sufferers. Agony aunt Claire Rayner - a fighter if ever there was - has announced that she has cancer and has had both breasts removed. Already, from her hospital bed she's berating the Labour party for their treatment of pensioners. Something tells me that breast cancer services are about to get severely rattled.

Published: 23/05/2001