Caroline Flint, the Minister for Europe recently featured on these pages for her sassy fashion sense, is clearly gunning for Gordon Brown.

Flint, who resigned on Friday, has accused the Prime Minister of using women merely as 'window dressing' and of having women around the table 'so that it looks like there are plenty of them', but that in his government women don't have any real power, are denied full Cabinet and senior positions and can't actually spend any money.

Downing Street is understood to be outraged by Flint's recent photoshoot in the Observer, clearly unaware that it's possible for a woman to have both beauty AND brains, and some believe that the photos have cost Flint a cabinet seat.

Shame, it made a nice change to see an actual female in Parliament rather than having to look at their pot-bellied, balding, jowly, spavinned excuses for humanity all the time.

Here's an article to make most women feel like underachievers.

Illegitimacy, a tough working-class background, an alcoholic mother who died young, adoptive parents who divorced, and a violent husband who left her a single mother of two were clearly no barrier to Caroline Flint, Minister for Europe.

As a constituency MP she currently represents my old home town of Doncaster, which is probably no picnic either. 

Add to that the fact that she can look like Scarlet O'Hara at the age of 47 and it's enough to make me weep into my Horlicks. 

Anyway, worth a read if only as inspiration - and check out the link to her modelling some high-street frocks. 

I suppose it's because I take it as given that as women, we all know that it's women and children who suffer the most in war. You can't protect yourself, you can't protect your children. The threat of sexual violence only adds insult to injury, and it is women, worldwide, and in all times, who have borne the brunt of it.

Most of us are lucky to have grown up in nations at peace. But I still know many women who've been raped. Raped by fathers, brothers, boyfriends, strangers.

Rape exists in every nation even in peacetime, but its use as a weapon of war should be no surprise to anyone who's read Susan Brownmiller's book Against Our Will. I have always remembered (though I paraphrase) General Patton's order concerning his own men: "In spite of my most diligent efforts, there will undoubtedly be some raping...and I want the offenders brought to me so that I can see them properly hanged." He was as good as his word, too - expeditiously trying and executing four American troops in Sicily who had raped Italian women.

Patton knew his history, and he knew that the story of conquest is indivisible from rape. But it was Brownmiller who made it clear that rape is not committed by retreating armies (too busy saving their skins) nor, generally, by front-line troops (too busy winning the battle). It is those who follow that cut a swathe through defenceless womanhood worldwide - the second-line Russians marching into Berlin, frustrated grunts in the Vietcong-infested jungle, irregular troops, militias, marauders and skirmishers of every description, in every war, everywhere, at every time.

In my lifetime, Americans have raped the Vietnamese wholesale, Pakistanis have raped Bengalis, Serbians have raped Bosnians, Israelis have raped Palestinians, and on it goes. The current world focus is on the Janjawiid militias, who are terrorising the women of Darfur, but in the most recent wars, militias raped virtually ALL the women in Liberia, while to this day, the women of the Congo are fair game for every soldier on every side, even those in the uniforms of peacekeepers.

As far as rape in warfare goes, the younger the victims the better (little girls are the best), and the more public the crime, the more effective it is - preferably gang-based, preferably in front of the men, preferably resulting in children of another colour, so that the entire fabric of society is shattered. There is no more certain way to plunge a nation into chaos than to pollute its women. So wholesale was the rape of Bengali women in the Bangladesh war that the government of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman declared all such victims 'heroines of the state' to prevent them being ostracised or killed by their own families.

The adoption of resolution 1820 in the Hague will do nothing to stop rape in war, but it is at least a step in the right direction and let us hope that it leads to the crime being seen for what it is - a political strategy used by the unscrupulous to create conflict and disorder for generations to come.

Despite the attacks of the God-botherers, who tried to sneak in a cut in the abortion limit under the wire of the embryology bill, Parliament saw sense on every count yesterday.

* The abortion limit remains at 24 weeks, despite attempts by right-wingers to cut it to 20 or even 12.

* Lesbian couples and single mothers need not now take the 'father's' view into account when seeking IVF.

* Embryos may be produced by implanting human DNA into animal eggs to produce hybrid embryos that can be used for stem cell research.

* And parents may choose a specific embryo to tissue-match a new baby to an existing child who has certain genetic disorders.

The whole thing was a triumph for reason and science over religion and knee-jerk emotion.

The move to cut the time limit on abortion had virtually no support in the UK outside religious pressure groups and the right-wing tabloid press. The population did not want a change, according to polls; the medical evidence was heavily against it since very few foetuses survive under 24 weeks (some 40 per cent die shortly after birth and the remainder are mostly very handicapped); the Health Minister Dawn Primarolo was in favour of keeping the limit at 24 weeks; and so were both heads of the major parties. Parliament was given a free vote so that Catholics and other religious minorities could vote according to conscience, but thankfully the move to cut the limit was defeated by around two to one.

In the UK, it should be noted, nearly 90 per cent of abortions take place within 12 weeks in any case - this, in spite of the fact that abortion on demand does not actually exist in the UK (which it does here in France). In the UK, a pregnant woman still has to prove that the birth would be detrimental to her physical or emotional health, or that the foetus would be handicapped, and obtain the consent of two doctors - in this regard the country lags far behind most other countries in Europe but luckily there are moves afoot to liberalise the legislation.

Furthermore, in the UK 68 per cent of abortions take place very early - inside nine weeks and only one per cent of abortions take place after 22 weeks. The 'problem' of the 'epidemic' of late-term abortion simply doesn't exist. It was not an issue that needed to be dealt with.

Many women do not know, incidentally, that around one in three women has an abortion during her lifetime, and that in the UK at least, as many abortions are carried out on women over the age of 50 as there are on girls under 16. We would do well remember in our steady middle age that it is not all irresponsible teenagers who end up in the club after a night on the tiles, but pre-menopausal and menopausal women who take their eye off the ball because we think we're past it.

The Bill's side-issues of 'Frankenstein siblings' and rabid lesbians jamming the IVF clinics to have fatherless babies were thankfully simply kicked into touch. What utter bollocks all this was. The British public, a libertarian lot, don't really give a stuff about who shags whom, as long as they don't do it in the street and frighten the horses, and if lesbians want to be parents, better good lesbians than bad heterosexuals - there are plenty of those about, after all.

The major portion of the embryology bill, however, is a real breakthrough for science, and in the absence of human eggs to experiment on should hopefully furnish our researchers with usable stem cells long into the future. The embryos will be destroyed after 14 days, just as with human embryos. The move brings the prospect of a cure for some terrible diseases much closer, including Alzheimer's, multiple sclerosis, spinal atrophy, Parkinson's and Huntingdon's Chorea (which killed my great-aunt and is currently killing one of my cousins).

In tandem, scientists will pursue the possibililty of adult-generated stem cells. Although the substantial reverse-engineering required for this currently renders the results too unreliable to use, it does at least lack any controversy at all, unlike the hybrid embryos, the prospect of which seems to make some people very queasy.

Believe it or not, that's what a bunch of women in Canada are currently doing, according to a story on Asylum.com.

In Burma, powerful men consider women to be inherently inferior and the military is said to have a superstitious belief that contact with women, or with female clothing, will weaken their strength.

The campaign to send knickers - preferably ones which have been worn - to the military was begun as a peaceful protest by women in Burma. Not only is it intended to put the junta to shame, it highlights the regime's record of rape and sexual enslavement of the country's women.

"It's been very well documented that rape has been used as a weapon of war in Burma. Soldiers go into villages and they systematically rape women. They have also used women as sexual slaves," said Mika Levesque, spokesperson for activist group Rights and Democracy.

In Canada, the campaign is being co-ordinated by Rights and Democracy alongside the Quebec Women's Federation.

For more information click here.