Women under 40 have won their battle. It’s the young men we now need to worry about

I am taken to task by the Guardian’s Ally Fogg for my Telegraph column on the growing underachievement of boys. It’s a thoughtful and spunky piece, which I thought worth replying to here. The phenomenon of male underperformance causes much angst on the left, demanding a choice between feminism and equality. For anyone born after Perry Como was in the charts, women are no longer underperforming. When law and medicine graduates are 60pc female, and girls a third more likely to apply to university than boys, we’re not looking at equality. We’re looking at a new inequality being incubated, because male horizons are narrowing. The notions of feminism and equality are becoming detached, which is horribly disorientating for some on the left. So what to do?

Mr Fogg starts by alerting his readers to the nature of the beast.

“For a traditional British conservative take on men’s issues, you can’t get much more pure than the editor of the Spectator writing in the Telegraph in defence of his chum Boris Johnson… The London mayor made a crass, sexist joke this week about Malaysian girls going off to university to find husbands.