And so Monday arrived, then Tuesday, and Wednesday, and Thursday - and still no answers were forthcoming. Mumsnetters started to wonder if the questions were simply too difficult for Penny Mordaunt to answer, and/or whether she was engaged in disagreements with her SPADs. (SPADS: special advisers, some of whom have a penchant for lobbying their own Ministers with politically ‘woke’ ideas, which are frequently out of step with the thinking of ordinary voters.) After all, this was all running parallel to Maria Miller getting held to account on Twitter by women about her lack of consultation with women’s organisations, women’s groups and women’s services prior to producing her Select Committee report on the GRA - a report which included proposals that if enacted would fundamentally affect women’s and girls’ lives.

The restless crowd began to wonder if Mordaunt and her SPADs were now caught between a rock and a hard place, because politicians don’t want to admit they’ve been throwing women and children under the bus, and being complicit in yet another potential safeguarding scandal, and these politicians certainly don’t want to go under the bus themselves. Eventually even the most Hackeresque Ministries know that waffle and contradictory statements won’t hack it any more once strong lights start to shine on them from places like Mumsnet.

Rowan from Mumsnet’s headquarters - a very popular and switched-on member of ‘MNHQ’ - posted an update about the unanswered questions at midday Thursday 14th March to the effect that something would be happening soon. Speculation among users mounted that the length of the delay might hopefully be commensurate with the quality and depth of the answers that were about to appear, but this reverted to concerns that the delay might be due to answers being run past ‘zillions of people’ and becoming chopped up and diluted down with each pass along the line - in other words, far from receiving the opinions of Penny Mordaunt, the posters of Mumsnet were in for a buffet of SPAD salad with lashings of meaningless-word toppings.

By 2pm, Penny Mordaunt’s electronic answer-sheet was still a no-show, and one poster pointed out the foolishness of an elected politician treating the users of such a huge British website - one which claims to have 14 millions unique users a month - so cavalierly. And it’s an interesting thought about elections. Mordaunt’s seat, Portsmouth North, isn’t a safe Conservative seat by any means; indeed I remember being at the election count in Portsmouth Guildhall where Sarah McCarthy-Fry won it for Labour and Mordaunt came 2nd. The seat then swung to Mordaunt in 2010, and the constituency for many decades prior had swung between Labour and the Tories, with personal popularity always having been a significant factor. One thing we know is that people in Portsmouth North don’t take kindly to politicians and ‘authorities’ who are perceived to be complacent about children’s safeguarding.

Indeed, the word in political circles now is that ‘gender self-ID’ ideology has belatedly been recognised as a big, fat political hot potato, one that no-one in Tory High Command realised until recently was being super-heated by a group of SPADs and not-so-senior civil servants. This is one hot potato that no-one in government now wants to catch - especially not on top of juggling the hell coals of Brexit. So it’s been left in the hands of Miller and Mordaunt to chuck around, possibly to each other, possibly for the whole of this Parliament.

By 3pm, there were still no answers forthcoming from Penny Mordaunt’s office. Jokes now abounded on Mumsnet about ‘Meaningful Webchat III’ and the availability of gin vouchers, amidst more serious points about whether women actually matter to the Minister for Women. 4pm arrived, and still there was nothing.

Finally, at a few minutes before 6pm, as Mordaunt herself was filing though the division lobbies of the House of Commons voting on Brexit amendments, ‘her’ answers were posted on the webchat board. It took Mumsnetters (a diligent and intelligent lot, whom politicians underestimate at their peril) a short while to trawl through them - and then with ice-cold restraint they kind of handed Penny Mordaunt her arse on a plate. They had hoped for the words of someone who was at least on top of her brief and who recognised the need to protect the sex-based rights of women and girls, but instead they got (and I say this with a reviewer’s hat on) a disjointed medley of politico-speak and ineffective deflection. She had had ample time to come up with answers of real substance, but interestingly she didn’t even seem to try. In fact her answers can be grouped into a number of overlapping categories: (1) Deliberately misunderstood the question; (2) Didn’t understand the question or the issue, and contradicted herself; (3) Resented being asked the question; and (4) Couldn’t be bothered to answer the question properly. As one poster put it, ‘80% of these answers weren’t actually answers were they?’ Another called the performance ‘clueless’. Ouch.

For example, she wittingly or unwittingly managed to ‘other’ women who have had hysterectomies or who have fertility issues by using them to make a point that didn’t even answer the question that had been asked of her. Another poster who was making a valid point about not wanting her child being taught a particular ideology of gender in school (as opposed to actual, proper science-based sex education) was advised to go see her MP. The issue of rapist men self-identifying as women and accessing women’s prisons was batted off to the Ministry of Justice, after she’d made clear that the women’s prison estate wasn’t at the top of the list of her priorities: ‘So the rights and feelings of actual women come second. Noted’ wrote one contributor, coolly.