There's no more vulnerable creature on the planet than a single thirty-or-fortysomething woman in desperate need of a date, says Jan Moir in the Daily Mail. That's why websites like Sugardaddie.com are so successful. These sites bring together "sugar babes" and time-poor, cash-rich older men who want "flirty, emotionally low-maintenance relationships" and are "willing to pay handsomely for the privilege". Or that's the theory. It doesn't always work out that way.
It certainly didn't for the women who met Jonathan Price, a serial conman who advertised on the website as someone in want of a wife, then fleeced the women who fell for his story. Price now faces a jail sentence after pleading guilty to fraud totalling £180,000 leaving three women and their parents without their life savings.
"Yes, what a heartless brute but come on," says Moir. "What would you do if an oafish, unshaven block of lard like him came into your life claiming to be an ex-SAS millionaire from Darlington, complete with speedboat, offshore bank accounts, friendships with Russian oligarchs, a lovely Knightsbridge flat and oh, here's the crunch, terminal cancer, too?
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Would your eyes whirl into dollar signs as you contemplated getting close to someone fabulously rich and about to fabulously die? Would you be channelling Joan Rivers, who once said that the perfect husband is a 96-year-old billionaire with a bad cough?"
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It's extraordinary, as Moir says, that Price's victims were so easily taken in. It didn't seem to strike them that there might be something dodgy going on especially as he kept asking for money, saying that while he had millions in the bank he couldn't get access to them right now so "how about a short-term loan in the meantime, doll"? This is someone, says one of Moir's friends, after meeting him, who "practically had CON MAN tattooed in neon on his forehead".
Sadly, however, Price's victims were stuck in the land of the cloud and the cuckoo. So here's a word of advice to Cinderellas everywhere, says Moir. Stop dreaming of a life far away; you're almost certainly better off sticking with the "ordinary bloke down the road".
Sex kittens and sexism
A French lingerie company has been offering advice to British women on how to be more seductive. One of its tips is "to imagine you are a cat". This didn't impress The Sunday Times's Rod Liddle. "Terrific," he says. "I look forward to seeing gullible British women sitting on the roof of the shed all afternoon decapitating a thrush, and suddenly darting into the middle of the road in front of a large truck. It won't be terribly seductive but it'll be worth watching."
Elsewhere, the lingerie firm, Soft Paris, urges women to "wear scented and edible cream so that your entire body is lickable". "Feminism," comments Liddle, "hasn't made great inroads across the Channel, has it?"
Tabloid money... It's a tax bust-up for cut-price Katie Price
"Josie Cunningham has acquired comedy-large breasts at a cost of £4,800 because she wants to be the new Katie Price'," says Jane Moore in The Sun. This has seen "her being dubbed Katie Cut-Price by cruel locals near her Leeds home". But the main difference is that Price pays for her own enhancements.
"The British taxpayer has stumped up the cash" for Cunningham. "So, if you're suffering from a degenerative illness and your Primary Care Trust has refused your life-prolonging drugs for purely financial reasons, how reassuring to know that cash can be found to help some dopey girl to feel better about herself."
The National Union of Teachers (NUT) has opposed nearly every significant education reform, says Ross Clark in the Daily Express. "Over the past week delegates have condemned free schools and academy schools, opposed the ending of national pay scales and the introduction of more flexible arrangements needed to attract some of the best teachers into the roughest and most underperforming schools. They have also voted to boycott literacy tests for primary school children."
There are plenty of dedicated teachers. "Yet thanks to the NUT the public image of a teacher is of a bearded Trot who wants all education replaced with Marxism studies."
Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls claims welfare reform that stops taxpayers subsidising spare rooms for social housing tenants is "unfair", says The Sun. "Surely not, Ed." But an even bigger fool is Labour MP Karl Turner, who thinks £140,000-a-year rail union boss Bob Crow deserves a subsidised council house "because he's a great socialist' and doesn't believe in home ownership".
