Editor-At-Large: Able women going to waste, while men talk

Then there was the battle of the photo ops – while Gordon Brown was busy getting tangoed to enhance his normal ghostly pallor, Silvio Berlusconi screamed his head off for Barack Obama to join him for a snap to flaunt back home. Back in WAG world, a line-up of slightly embarrassed over-dressed women posed at Covent Garden during a "cultural" interlude hosted by Mariella Frostrup. Women all over the world balance the household accounts, juggling family and work, run their own businesses and do 90 per cent of the shopping. But only two of my sex (German's Angela Merkel and Cristina Fernandez, President of Argentina) got to have a say in how the global economy can be put to rights, when it seems we're in this mess primarily because of male testosterone levels in the world of finance. The managing director of the World Bank is female, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, but on the night Gordon and the G20 leaders had a working dinner at No 10, she was condemned to the "girls' night" in a back room with Sarah and her motley crew of notable female Britons.

I find this notion of WAG world with its sanitised agenda of culture and charity distressing because it trivialises my sex and reinforces the notion that we, the public, should be interested in what these unelected females get up to instead of doing a real job. We are meant to buy the idea that simply being married to a powerful bloke is a job in itself. Let's start with Sarah Brown's choice of guests to impress the wives of world leaders, which was so politically correct you want to weep: her mum, J K Rowling and Dame Kelly Holmes. I suppose we can forgive the inclusion of mum, because life wouldn't have been worth living if she'd been left out. J K Rowling is impressive by any standards, even if she is a big Labour donor. But Naomi Campbell? How can a woman who has been found guilty of assault, who's battled with cocaine addiction, and who represents no sort of role model whatsoever for young black Britons, be representative of anything except the triumph of self-interest? Why are successful black people always deemed to be models, singers or sportspeople? Why no black headmistresses, bankers or businesswomen? Ruth Jones – a smart actress, surely picked because she was Welsh – but what about world stars such as Dame Judi Dench? Or scientists such as Susan Greenfield? The entire female Asian community was represented by Gurinder Chadha whose latest film Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging was a lorryload of utter tripe. Then there's Dame Gail Ronson, an ex-model and formidable charity fundraiser married to a multimillionaire, reinforcing the notion that WAGs primarily specialise in doing good.

I felt profoundly sorry for the mum with terminal cancer whose stay in Maggie's Centre in London was hijacked by Sarah Brown and Michelle Obama for a photo op. Every one of us knows relatives and friends who have cancer and who have lost their lives to it, and women give a lot of time and money towards charities connected with the disease. Mrs Brown and Mrs Obama want to endorse good causes, because it is seen as the "right" thing for them to do. It's non-controversial, a no-brainer. Sarah Brown has given lunches for prominent women in London and New York to raise the profile of a charity helping women who die in childbirth – another worthy cause.

What makes me depressed is this constant reinforcing of women as do-gooders, as modern-day angels of mercy. In the real world, women snarl, fight dirty, hustle with the rest of them, and have to work five times as hard to get to the top. Real women give to charitable causes without a single photographer recording the event. The trouble with WAGs is they used to have real jobs, but now they're not allowed to. I'd be more impressed if Michelle Obama had stayed at home, dug her veg garden and carried on working part-time. She's got a couple of kids, but why can't Sarah Brown go back to being the successful PR she once was? Working women with families don't have any choice.

You're the first, the last, my every bean ...

In the Royal Horticultural Society garden at Wisley, MP3 players connected to the roots of tomato plants are playing A Midsummer's Night Dream, a reading of The Day of the Triffids, or nothing at all.

One experiment has already proved that rice plants responded well to classical music, and some of the gardeners at Wisley are already convinced that their plants do better when coaxed. A professor of acoustics is convinced that low frequency sounds will produce the best results as the vibrations stimulate growth.

I'm planning a Barry White spring for my broad beans.

Focus on a man's violence, not his victim

Keira Knightley has been signed up as the new "face" of domestic violence. A hard-hitting ad, showing on television and at cinemas from tomorrow, features Keira leaving a film set, going home and getting beaten up. Commissioned by the charity Women's Aid, the ad ends with a plea for us to contribute £2 a month to help save women's lives. Celebrity endorsements for charities are commonplace these days. But do they work? Recently, the singer Rihanna was allegedly beaten up by her partner Chris Brown. Wouldn't a campaign that showed a well-known man inflicting violence on a woman make a much bigger impact than one that shows Keira as a victim?

The treasures we seldom see

The Whitechapel Gallery reopens today and both Tate Modern and the British Museum announced massive new extensions last week. At over £210m and £135m apiece, these are ambitious projects by famous architects, but why don't leading museum directors make the buildings they already have work better? The British Museum is bustling on the ground floor, but upstairs it's like a morgue, and although the V and A has opened its new performance galleries, most of the upper levels are deserted. Better to showcase what's languishing in storage, and send the public upwards instead of sideways.