PLATELL’S PEOPLE: Yes, Myleen Klass you ARE mum to the babies that you lost

Myleene Klass’s revelation that she is ‘Mama to seven children’ is confusing. She has two daughters by her ex-husband and a son by her current partner. By anyone’s calculation that’s three kids. But she was including in her family the four babies she miscarried. She told of the trauma she suffered, describing the souls she lost as her ‘four little stars in the sky’

Myleene Klass’s revelation that she is ‘Mama to seven children’ is confusing. 

She has two daughters by her ex-husband and a son by her current partner. By anyone’s calculation that’s three kids.

But she was including in her family the four babies she miscarried. She told of the trauma she suffered, describing the souls she lost as her ‘four little stars in the sky’.

Is Myleene right to consider herself a mother of seven? Should she not move on, be grateful for her daughters Ava, 13, and Hero, nine, and her year-old son Apollo?

I’ve never considered myself a mum, even though my only pregnancy was ectopic and never came to term. And only some friends who have miscarried say they are mothers of the children they have lost.

One in four pregnancies end in miscarriage, and I’d vouch that by far the majority of women who suffered them do not consider they are ‘mothers’ because of them. This is not to diminish their agony, their sense of grief and bereavement — it’s simply how these women coped.

Yet Myleene’s bold claim of motherhood of her unborn babies should be heard loud and clear. For it highlights the sanctity of life and the utter misery we feel when that life is extinguished, however tender the age. 

During a routine scan to check the development of the first baby she lost, she said, ‘the familiar black and blue image of my baby sprung on to the screen, started to sink and slowly floated down, till it was just hunched over. I knew’.

Three more miscarriages were to come, each leaving her devastated. 

‘Having everything one minute, a name, a school, then nothing.’

By speaking with such raw candour, she gives us a new and nuanced perspective in the polarised abortion debate. 

The arguments have become so acrimonious, so dogmatic, that a woman’s attachment to the growing child inside her, and that overwhelming sense of motherhood, is too often ignored.

Myleene seems determined to change that. The pro-choice lobby may not like it, but her choice — to proclaim to the world that she is the mother to those children she lost — deserves nothing but our respect. 

Put ’em away, Mandy

Well done Amanda Holden, highlighting the need for regular mammograms, by sharing her own experience. 

Even though it’s small solace for hundreds of thousands of women who, under current GP restrictions, can’t even get a scan. 

As for Amanda’s claim ‘my boobs always seem to be in the headlines for silly reasons’, there is a remedy. Stop flashing them. 

Well done Amanda Holden, highlighting the need for regular mammograms, by sharing her own experience

Well done Amanda Holden, highlighting the need for regular mammograms, by sharing her own experience

It’s Mayor Andy Zoolander

In a scruffy shirt and anorak, mayor Andy Burnham vowed that Manchester will not be sacrificed like ‘canaries down the coal mine’ in new lockdowns.

Was he modelling the comically modish Derek Zoolander, from the movie of the same name, who returns home to reconnect with his dad and two brothers, all miners?

To which the men reply: ‘Derek, you are an embarrassment’.

Westminster wars

  • SNP MP Margaret Ferrier, who travelled by train from London to Scotland knowing she’d tested positive with Covid — possibly infecting hundreds — will not be prosecuted. Meanwhile, Scouse gym owner Nick Whitcombe was raided by cops and issued with an on-the-spot £1,000 fine for not closing his doors. Fans of what social media now call ‘that gym guy’ have already raised £28,000 and counting to bail him out, a sure sign the natives are restless.
  • Endearing though the sight of our shambolic PM’s shirt cuffs buttoned up the wrong way was, he then appeared at the Despatch Box with a snowfall of dandruff on his collar. Where is Boris’s fiancée Carrie when he needs her? 
  • Lucy, from Essex, took to the radio phone-in after hearing she was being locked down again, declaring she’d have her sister and her children over tomorrow for their first Sunday lunch in five months. ‘Fine me, arrest me, send me to prison if you want, I will no longer be cowed by these ridiculous diktats,’ she said. It looks as though the era of Co-bedience is well and truly over.

SNP MP Margaret Ferrier, who travelled by train from London to Scotland knowing she’d tested positive with Covid — possibly infecting hundreds — will not be prosecuted

Don’t stop, Stevie

Top hats off to fashion icon Fleetwood Mac’s Stevie Nicks, 72, who was asked if she knew during the band’s heyday that she was sublimely beautiful. Instead of the usual piffle from gorgeous celebrities that she was a tomboy, plain, awkward, bullied etc… she said: ‘Of course! But no matter how beautiful you are, you’re going to get older. So roll with the punches.’

Or, as Stevie still sings, just go your own way.   

Anais in her morning glory

By day she treasures her anonymity raising goats with her boyfriend on a Dorset farm, by night she’s a lingerie model in barely-there bondage underwear.

Yet when it comes to promoting the Bluebells autumn collection, Anais Gallagher reveals she was frightened to show the pictures to her dad, Oasis’s Noel Gallagher.

Although she adds: ‘I think any father would be happy with this message of their daughter being empowered, and that’s exactly what this is.’

Isn’t there something rather sad about a woman of 20 posing in her knickers and stockings in a bath to get Dad’s attention?

Strictly’s back tonight, hurrah. Yet not without another outpouring of grief from head judge Shirley Ballas whingeing on about how Craig Revel Horwood was once disparaging about her breasts.

It left her distraught, she claims. Dear me, who does she think she is, Pamela Anderson?

Eyebrows were raised when the Queen made her first public appearance in seven months wearing a chic rose pink cashmere coat and, gasp, no mask!

Perhaps our wise sovereign is, as she has always been, in touch with public sentiment, understanding that the imposition of Covid martial law has gone too far.

Having gained her farming expertise in rural Gloucestershire where her family had a fruit and veg garden and raised a few chooks, Countryfile presenter Ellie Harrison demands that we do more to stamp out racism in our rural areas.

‘In asking whether the countryside is racist, then, yes, it is,’ she opines, ‘but asking if it’s more racist than anywhere else — maybe, maybe not.’

My, Ellie! Your geography degree from King’s College London certainly doesn’t appear to have honed your deb-ating skills.

News that Naga Munchetty is taking over the Radio 5 Live morning chat show was like hearing your boiler has broken down.

She may be one of the BBC’s top female earners on more than £250,000 — but having endured her summer trial on 5 Live, listeners like me know that Nags has all the warmth of a cold shower on a chilly autumn morning.

Paul Hollywood’s less-than-shy ex, Summer Monteys-Fullam is fed up with being referenced on social media as, er, Paul Hollywood’s ex.

‘I want to be known for what I’m good at,’ she trills. So when will they start giving out OBEs for services to boob tubes?

  • TV’s Kirsty Gallacher says she suffered post-traumatic stress disorder after her divorce from rugby star Paul Sampson. Having survived an incredibly painful divorce myself, I do understand how bad it is. But PTSD? Come on Kirsty, it’s not the kind of horror soldiers experience.

Trolls are demanding Malala Yousafzai be deported after she supported a friend trying to become president of Oxford University Conservative Association.

You can be sure this remarkable young woman, who took a Taliban bullet in her head for defending a girl’s right to education, and is now a Nobel Peace Prize winner, won’t be cowed by a bunch of cowardly keyboard warriors.