Cécile Duflot, French housing minister, has caused a commotion by wearing a dress to speak to the National Assembly. Wait, correct that. It wasn't Duflot causing the commotion, but rather the male ministers who wolf-whistled and shouted: "Phwoarr!" For her part, Duflot reacted calmly, with a dry wit – "Ladies and gentlemen. Obviously more gentlemen than ladies" – before continuing with business. Later, she said: "I have worked in the building trade and I have never seen anything like that. This tells you something about some MPs. I think of their wives." Yes, the poor wives, married to what appear to be "les troglodytes sérieux", but that's not the end of it.

Pity France, when their National Assembly is full of the kind of goons who are unable to contain themselves when a female minister stands before them in a dress. "Phwoarr!" Really? What is this, Confessions of a French Minister? Fifty Shades of Pinstripe? Duflot's dress wasn't even some provocative Jessica Rabbit affair: tight-fitting, slinky, perhaps slashed to the thigh, with the next housing bill tucked into a garter. It was a demure floral number – something you could imagine Kirstie Allsopp wearing to her third best friend's wedding. If this is all it takes to get male politicos dangerously excited, then heaven help France – they'll be swooning at the sight of ladies' ankles next.

Duflot says that not all men are like this, and she'd rather think of "feminist men". Quite. But why should female politicians have to steel themselves for this kind of dreary reductive pantomime? Duflot famously wore jeans to a cabinet meeting, but it took a dress to expose the opportunistic boorishness of predominantly male political power. Jacques Myard said that the wolf whistles were merely a tribute to Duflot's beauty. Patrick Balkany said that she probably put on the dress "so that we wouldn't listen to what she is saying".

It comes as no surprise that both these men, and many others who wolf-whistled, leered and phwoarred, are in the opposing Union for a Popular Movement party. What they did wasn't appreciation, or even a joke, it was cold political strategy – using a woman's gender against her.

I have written before about how female politicians can't win where their appearance is concerned. Too much grooming and they're dismissed as dolly birds, desperate, or both; too little, and they're damned as sexless munters, who've let themselves go. It's the female politician's lot to be seen and not heard. Or, at least, seen (judged, objectified, mocked) much more than she is ever allowed to be heard.

And yet any politician, male or female, is nothing if not properly heard. Which makes a mockery of the rationale that says that maybe these women relish incidents such as this, because it gives them martyred feminist chops and raises their profile.

In reality, these events fatally undermine the women involved, weakening their message and derailing their momentum. After the National Assembly, no one was talking about what Duflot had actually said, just about her flowery dress. A classic case of "politician interrupted".

It's an issue that keeps coming up: is this the default setting of the political male, sexist-juvenile? Are there enough "feminist men" to go around? Indeed, maybe this incident is just another marker for the wider concern of whether women can ever hope to be treated completely equally, in politics.

From what happened in France to David Cameron's dreadful and revealing "calm down, dear" to Labour's Angela Eagle, there seems to be a disconcerting trend of shutting women up as soon as they try to open their mouths.

This time it was a dress, but really it could be anything at all – to the point where it's never about what a woman said, but how quickly and effectively "the boys" have silenced her before she could say it.

For Christ's sake, this is a real mess of a television show



The ITV show Superstar, where Andrew Lloyd Webber searches for the lead for Jesus Christ Superstar, has even been beaten in the ratings by Countryfile. You'd have thought that there'd be no contest between the Messiah and people in cagoules leaning on stiles, but ratings work in mysterious ways.

As a major JCS-head (the New Testament set to music, what's not to like?), I know exactly where they've gone wrong. Running it over consecutive nights instead of making it a weekly event. Having sing-offs at the start of shows (goodbye sense of suspense). Making contestants sing weedy pop instead of rock or musical theatre classics. Christ died for our sins, not the Magic 105.4 playlist.

It doesn't end there. If judge Jason Donovan says "storytelling is the most important thing" one more time, I'll suffocate him with his multicoloured dreamcoat. Moreover, they should have simultaneously searched for Judas. As any JSC-head could tell you, it's the charged Jesus-Judas "bromance" that makes the film more than just a bunch of wailing hippies in tie-dye. Lloyd Webber should get back to the BBC and ITV should be ashamed. The son of God has been badly let down. Again.

Boo to your boot camp, Mr Clegg

Nick Clegg has announced a £126m government scheme aimed at 55,000 16-17-year-old "Neets" (those not in education, employment or training). It will involve private companies, charities and former army personnel offering motivational courses, catch-up lessons in maths and English and even wake-up calls in the morning to help them handle the concept of "setting a routine".

Hmm. While I have nothing against former army personnel, why are they being drafted in to help these vulnerable young people in such a pointed way? It gives the whole exercise an over-pressurised boot camp cum "bring back national service" feel. Which, in turn, frames youth unemployment in the same way as, say, delinquency or anything else reliant on personal responsibility and failure, rather than what it actually is – the state failing to help sufficiently.

These organisations will also be "paid by results", at a rate of up to £2,200 for every Neet they help get into education, employment or training for six months or more. This effectively means that the onus is on them to achieve what the government has actively failed to do in all this time. They also have the prospect of not being paid should they fail – that is, to pull off this immense feat that the government has already failed at.

The youngsters, and those helping them, seem to have been handed a bogus lifeline. The government has effectively outsourced one of the major problems of the age (national youth unemployment, which has been decades in the making) on a bizarre unworkable "PAYG" basis, while trying to avoid the blame if (when?) it all goes wrong. How gullible do they think people are? It seems to me that it's not just the Neets who could do with a wake-up call.