Lena Dunham and Vogue: Since when did being feminist mean showing off your pimples?

Poor Lena Dunham. She spends every waking moment for the last five years creating one of the most successful TV representations of women in the last decade, giving inspiration to writers, actresses and viewers worldwide as a feminist icon – but no, she is actually a very bad feminist, as she permitted her face to be retouched on the cover of Vogue.

No matter that every picture in every magazine is touched up slightly and Lena would have had little control if someone wanted to remove a blemish or make her eye-bags a little less prominent. And who cares if the photos we take of ourselves these days are all whizzed through Instagram filters and cropped at the neck to stop anyone seeing our spam arms.

No matter, because the fact is Lena, who is a bad feminist, should have said: “Thank you for offering me the cover of Vogue and although this is a massive leap forward to let a non-model female writer on the cover, I refuse unless you let me appear in my dressing gown with my moustache unbleached and some cellulite on display, for I am woman hear me roar.”

This must make me a bad feminist, too, because if they ever ask me to be on the front of Vogue, I would be in make-up for eight solid hours and so retouched they’d need to make the coverline extra large to reveal who I was originally.

Edwina Currie is one of those people who really shouldn’t go on Twitter. Obviously it’s bloody good fun for all of us at home, but for David Cameron’s sanity he should encourage her to instead take up Connect Four and macramé.

Food-bank users, she tweeted, spend their spare cash on dog food and tattoos. We have seen a similar lack of empathy among Tories before, so that’s no surprise; and the tattoo reference is clearly something Currie picked up off Channel 4’s My Tattoo Addiction. However, the “dog food” quip is interesting as Currie clearly thinks that the poor should have their pets put down or sent to animal rescues, which is a peculiarly non-British, black-hearted way of looking at people at their lowest ebb. She reminds me why I often prefer animals to humans.