Here's the news: the 'Daily Mail' is bad for your health

I'm getting concerned about readers of the Daily Mail. How do they get through the day? Imagine the average Mail-reading woman, let us call her Gloria, at breakfast. Grapefruit juice. Muesli. Toast and honey. PG Tips. The morning paper... What's this on the front page, above the splash? "Did Having Sex Give This Woman Cancer? (...and could it happen to you?)". Blimey. Could it? Gloria turns to page 38 and reads about a wholesome dame called Rachel who picked up a sexually transmitted virus that can give you cervical cancer. The stricken Rachel warned that "as many as 50 per cent of women may carry HPV at some point in their life". This is the cheery highlight of the "Good Health" section. In need of some positive input, Gloria scans the rest of the section. Perhaps there'll be a nice article on sensible suntanning or something? But no. She reads about how Roy Strong's wife nearly died of deep-vein thrombosis after sitting in a Lufthansa jet. And there's "A terrifying account of what it is like to suffer a killer allergy... could it happen to you?", the allergy in question being to wasp stings.

Gloria has had enough of Good Health and turns to the features section, there to read about the "tragic finale" to the life of Elizabeth Taylor. No, Ms Taylor has not expired. But something infinitely worse (to Daily Mail eyes) has happened. She has been having sex, at 71, with her 33-year-old butler, Jean-Luc, who is a) French and b) being paid for it. (At least, that's the story being told to a Los Angeles court by another employee.) "How," demands the writer, "can one of the most famously voluptuous women in the world be reduced to such utter tawdriness?". (But since "voluptuous" is defined as "Of, tending to, or occupied with sensuous or sensual pleasure", that's precisely why the old trouper should want to make Jean-Luc her live-in sex toy).

On page 23, under the heading "The Britney Generation", is a picture of five girls, aged 7, 8 and 9, dressed in "their favourite clothes". They are sweet things, in their Gwen Stefani tartan skirts, midriff-flashing strappy tops, and little hot pants - and they've been posed for the Mail's cameraman, David Cruickshanks, in classic hooker stances, hands on hips, rouged faces, come-hither smiles, as the accompanying text asks, "Is this a case of irresponsible parenting or just a harmless fad?". It's clear that the Mail thinks it appalling that children should be portrayed as sexy minxes - despite presenting its girlish quintet as precisely that.

Gloria wonders about her own daughters' approach to puberty, - but blow me down if the Mail hasn't got there ahead of her. "Only abstinence can halt teen sex infection", yells the headline on another page, over a glum recital of health education programme statistics in the US.

Is there any chance of reading something amusing or upbeat? She can search the Mail's pages but first she must get past a spread headlined "Asylum Health Timebomb" over a story about how asylum seekers are bringing with them infectious diseases including Aids and TB, and how "Africans account for one in three HIV cases in Britain...".

How queasy is Gloria feeling? She has digested the news that half the women in Britain are carrying a sexually transmitted cancer-causing virus, that the nation's children have become apprentice prostitutes, that a voluptuous septuagenarian has been shagging a Frenchman half her age, that all teenagers must abstain from sex as their only hope of avoiding gonorrhoea, that picnic wasps may kill you, that an aeroplane flight from Germany may give you blood clots, and that asylum-seekers are dirty scum riddled with Aids and TB.

For years, the Mail has been the paper to lower your spirits, puncture your bubble, shatter your daydreams and explain in loud and bracing terms that, Sorry, no, you were quite wrong - the world is not a pleasant place with lots of sunshine, pals, Pinot Grigio, vanilla yoghurt, fast cars and Kylie Minogue's bottom. That, on the contrary, it is a horrible, sinister place where everything conspires to ruin your life.

Now it seems to have reached record levels of sulphurous complaint. If it had a job, the Mail would be an intolerably bossy nanny, forever telling her charges not to think of doing this or that, for fear of putting their eye out, being run over by a car, being eaten by a bear, making the house fall down, or having something wrap itself around your heart until you die. Poor bloody kids. Poor bloody readers.