Mary Beard and Janet Street-Porter go to battle Mary Beard and Janet Street-Porter are two of the most opinionated women in the land, but, up until now, they have refrained from commenting about each other. Street-Porter could not, however, hold her tongue when the television historian felt the need to acquaint the world with her views on the new M&S advertising campaign. "Unless I have mistaken Helen Mirren's blonde, I don't spot a whiff of grey," Beard harrumphed. Street-Porter felt this was simply an opinion too far. She wondered why the "highly respected academic" had to "opine... about issues that aren't worthy of her attention... Mary seems a little too keen to comment on trivia for my taste. She added, for good measure, that her "whingeing" had ensured "maximum media coverage." Beard, needless to say, felt that she could not let this pass without comment. On the Twitter social networking site, she disputed that she had "whinged" and cheerfully "re-tweeted" a follower who told her: "It's not like dear Janet has never commented on anything, is it?" Beard accepted the M&S campaign was not "the biggest issue facing the world or women today" and professed to be bemused by the ensuing media interest. Within 48 hours, I was being branded either as a heroine standing up for the cause of us older women, or as an academic with so much time on her hands she could afford to waste it on this kind of campaign, or as a batty old harridan who didn't understand advertising. The invisible man Michael Dugher, the MP for Barnsley East who is in the running for Tom Watson's old job of election supremo, has just written on LabourList about his party's achievements during a "100 per cent focused" summer. "When people tell you Labour has been silent this summer, don't believe a word of it," he says, pointing to the contributions of, among others, Andy Burnham, Chris Bryant (I kid you not), Stephen Twigg, Caroline Flint, Jon Trickett and Chris Leslie. Oddly, in Dugher's list of the "top 20 interventions since the start of the summer recess," one man goes completely unmentioned: Ed Miliband, his leader.