Wimmin who hate wimmin

Stop me if you've heard me say this before: women are their own worst enemy - more exactly, women are the worst enemy of other women.

Today's paper has an article about Mhairi Black MP written by a woman.

The article - as all the other articles have - focussed on her age (or lack of it), on the fact that she took a selfie eating chips in London and when she was 15 she and her pals used to go out under-age drinking and post messages about it on social media. Her age isn't an issue - time will take care of that. Eating chips? Who cares? And if you can claim you did nothing stupid in your teens, you're either Mother Theresa or you're lying. The image the press seem to want to project of Mhairi Black is that she's what we in Glasgow used to call a keeley - uneducated, a bit dim and, heaven help us all, common.

But the most important things about Mhairi Black are, in my opinion: she's a woman; she's working class and has a different take on life from her predecessor in the Paisley seat; she's clever and has got elected even though she hasn't completed her university course, although she plans to; she's committed to politics (even if I personally don't agree with her politics); and she is a fantastic and passionate speaker. In speaking, she is focussed and direct and uses language that the rest of us can understand. She doesn't know about sound bites but she doesn't waste words. (Gordon Brown could take a few lessons from her in that respect).

So why do I single out the writer of today's article for being anti-women? Because the approach the writer took is lazy. She went for the obvious and added nothing to our knowledge of what Mhairi Black hopes to achieve in Westminster.

It's also about fairness. Kirsten Oswald (now my MP) has been singled out by a newspaper that should know better (the only one that supports independence) because her husband has joined the Labour party. If you have a male MP, do you really expect to know - or care - which political party his partner belongs to?

The odds on any woman in politics getting support from the UK press are pretty poor. There's talk of Yvette Cooper being 'tainted' because she's married to Ed Balls. And the rightwing press which hates John Bercow, the Speaker of the House of Commons, has leapt on Sally Bercow's adultery as a stick to hit him with.

And, yes, if you're asking, I do expect women working on newspapers to set a higher tone than men. Or at the very least to be able to spot the difference between writing comment and writing fluff - and fight for their right to comment on women's politics, not on the trivia around them.