The Daily Mail takes on Tom's wife

The Daily Mail frets over the world we have made in Britain, chewing away at the edges of the nasty side of the country. How can everything be so bad, it wonders? Why are people so terrible?

Perhaps part of the answer might lay in the spiteful nature of the media. As evidenced by, say, the approach taken to Tom Jones' wife in today's Mail.

Melinda Woodward suffers from agoraphobia, and leads a quiet and blameless life with Tom in their big, paid-for home. Apparently, the Mail believes this is something which requires an expose of some sort:

It IS unusual ...the weird world of Mrs Tom Jones, not your typical Hollywood wife

What follows is a nasty mixture of sneering and unsubtle attempts to turn the woman into a freakshow. What makes it even worse is the writer, Paul Scott, cheerfully admits he knows what the pointless article is going to do the woman:

Friends say she has also come to dread going out in public because she fears she is being gossiped and sniggered about because of Tom's formidable reputation as an unreconstructed Lothario.

Nevertheless, Scott continues his mix of gossip and sniggering for a few hundred more words. Still, he happily points out that she doesn't read the papers because of her fear of being a target for this sort of thing, so Scott is able to take comfort in knowing he's ridiculing his target behind her back.

However nasty Britain might be, it's always going to have a have a house journal of spite to turn to.