The media attack when Paul McCartney and his wife Heather announced her pregnancy may have been aimed more at him than her, argues Kathy Sheridan.
'Daddy Macca at 61", yelped the Daily Mirror's front page, the "61" picked out in vibrant red. "There's life in the old dog yet", purred Gerry Marsden, lead singer of the aptly-named Pacemakers. Any life in the old bitch, then? "Older mums, bigger risks", ran the obligatory "health" panel in the Mirror, against an ominous black background. For the record, Heather is 34. Nearly half the age of Daddy Macca with what the Mirror calls his "low sperm count".
It got better. The Daily Star had its cake and ate it. It offered "huge congratulations" while opening up a whole cannery of worms. The announcement, it said, should silence the "tasteless sniping". Why was that? Because the news proved "this pair are for real". Meaning what? That Heather is not after all, John Lennon reconstituted in drag? That she might be missing a leg but can still be a proper woman? No. Sorry, just got it. What they mean is that she has sex with her husband and here's the irrefutable proof. Now why would we need proof of that? (And have you ever heard of IVF, lads?) Because they've all done such a majestic job of trashing Heather in the first place.
So when that so-called thieving, lying, glamour-modelling, Arab-loving, gold-digging, Beatle-bagging bit of blonde, brainless fluff who managed to haul herself upmarket by doing charity stuff, does something as irreproachable as getting pregnant by old Macca, her tormentors are compelled to perform some monumental volte-face to stay abreast of their ooh-ing and aah-ing readers.
Anyway, even they must have realised that there's a limit to the recycling you can do with old news. The single remaining weapon - and it's a dilly - is contained in the magnificently pregnant question, as exemplified by the Sun: "It was unclear last night what Macca's other children think of their dad's news".
Well, now, there must be something wrong there or they wouldn't be bringing it up, would they? But the problem is that unless Stella, the designer, opens her beak on the subject, we will never know. The others don't mix it with the media. However, ages have been noted, portentously.
Macca's step-daughter (daughter of the late, lamented Linda) is a good four years older than Heather. His three offspring with Linda are 33, 31 and 26. For a long time, rumour has had it that none of them is exactly delighted with the stepmother. Far from crushing the stories with a conciliatory word or two, Stella once told an interviewer nonchalantly: "You can't keep everyone happy all the time, can you?"
On the one hand, it's understandable. A friend whose parents had achieved an amicable separation and whose mother then presented him with a new-born step-sibling when he was well into college years, was surprised by the temporary jolt he felt: "It was a vague sense of something being out of the natural order of things. You're in university. You've met the woman who will probably be your wife and you're looking ahead maybe to becoming parents and your own parents being grandparents. And suddenly, you have to take a step back when along comes a new sibling. They do form a kind of new nucleus and there's no way around that".
The temptation, on the other hand, is to say, for heaven's sake get over it. Macca is a patently happy man with his pregnant bride and it beats mouldering away into a lonely old age. But perhaps the McCarthy offspring know something that we don't.
In an odd piece of timing, Stella has begun to hurl little darts at her father in recent weeks. Apart from the music, the achievement for which he is admired is for raising a clutch of "grounded" children, in spite of the fame, wealth and adulation.
Chief among his strategies for achieving this was sending them to the local comprehensive. Now Stella claims to have been damaged by the experience and says that it has left her constantly trying to prove herself and to make people like her.
Worse, she impugns his motives for sending her there, saying that he was "tight". And worst of all, she adds that she has no intention of bringing up her children in the same way - a savagely wounding comment towards any parent, that coincidentally or not, appeared in print during the early weeks of Heather's pregnancy.
Who knows what lies behind any of the antipathy - media or personal - towards Heather? It's not as though she was a schemer who snatched Paul from another woman.
Some suggest that if she had only been "straight" with the tabloids, i.e. not attempted to reinvent herself quite so heroically, they would not have been so hostile. A likely story. Others say it's quite simply because no one is allowed to have a relationship with a Beatle.
But is there an even simpler explanation? It has long been noted that many bereaved, separated or divorced men with a minimum of teeth, hair and cash tend to form new families with a speed that to many women, verges on the indecent. Suffice to say that Linda was hardly dead a year when Paul set eyes on Heather.
Matt Seaton, writing in yesterday's Guardian and a widower himself (his first wife, Ruth Picardie, pioneered the death diary genre, while dying from cancer), puts the Heather-hate down squarely to her temerity in filling the space left by the belatedly media-canonised Linda.
By moving on, says Seaton, McCartney did only what was normal and even necessary, "yet for some observers there will always be a sense of betrayal, a feeling that a kind of infidelity that defiles the memory of the dear departed has taken place".
What happens, he says, is that any direct expression of this is thwarted because of a prohibition against articulating such criticism of the widow or widower - and so the "next partner" becomes the lightning conductor. All written, it must be said, in the tone of a man who might have experienced just such a phenomenon, by extension.
All of which implies that Paul is the real target of the Heather-hate. But think about it. In a reverse situation, how many men do you know have got it in the neck like Heather?