Editor-At-Large: Delia and Martha do women no favours

They're both 63, and have spent all their working lives telling us what to do - how to boil an egg, how to lay a table, how to rustle up the perfect dinner party, how to fold a napkin. How have I got through several decades and many marriages without one of their manuals? I can't be typical - because Delia Smith and Martha Stewart are both multi-millionaires, and they've made all that cash out of stating the blindingly obvious, in books, on television, in videos and by sticking their names on everything from wooden spoons to biscuits. Their empires have grown and grown, their domestic authority absolute. These 60-plus goddesses of domesticity have always seemed so serene, so self-satisfied, so nauseatingly confident. The rest of us feel guilty every time we open a can.

They're both 63, and have spent all their working lives telling us what to do - how to boil an egg, how to lay a table, how to rustle up the perfect dinner party, how to fold a napkin. How have I got through several decades and many marriages without one of their manuals? I can't be typical - because Delia Smith and Martha Stewart are both multi-millionaires, and they've made all that cash out of stating the blindingly obvious, in books, on television, in videos and by sticking their names on everything from wooden spoons to biscuits. Their empires have grown and grown, their domestic authority absolute. These 60-plus goddesses of domesticity have always seemed so serene, so self-satisfied, so nauseatingly confident. The rest of us feel guilty every time we open a can.

So how we all chuckled this week when both of these modern-day saints embarked on a serious bit of emergency rebranding; God forbid we get to glimpse anything other than the official version of their perfection. Saint Delia's halo slipped as she rushed from the directors' box and on to the pitch at Norwich City at half-time and started to hector fans madly about their failure (in her eyes) to support the team into which she has ploughed £7m of her own cash. Now Delia has been rapidly doing a spot of damage limitation, telling the local radio station that she's just a football-mad pensioner and most definitely wasn't drunk. Perish the thought!

As her embarrassing outburst (broadcast live on Sky) is replayed endlessly on the internet, Delia is anxious to set the record straight. We are told she's a devout Catholic, and takes a lot of trouble to promote family values and the community spirit at Norwich, visiting the training ground every Thursday and teaching the players' wives how to cook her team high-energy meals. Newly promoted Norwich, once a loss-making outfit, will now will go into profit and its six restaurants will turn over £3.3m year. So St Delia's not just injected cash and become the biggest shareholder, but also given the club and their supporters back their self-esteem. And it doesn't stop there. Worth more than £30m, she sold her publishing company for £3.6m in January and doesn't plan to write any more cookery books. The official line is that she's now "semi-retired" and will be devoting her life to football instead of culinary skills.

On the other side of the Atlantic, Martha Stewart left the women's prison last Friday where she has spent her time since October, convicted of lying over the sale of stocks in 2001. Her company, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, has seen its shares soar in value since her conviction, but it posted losses of $7.3m in the last quarter of 2004. Now Martha, too, must embark on an intensive strategy of rebranding, turning a spell in clink into a career plus. She's 20 pounds lighter, wears an electronic tag and will spend the next five months under house arrest.

But Ms Stewart is not suffering the kind of domestic detention our government plans for those suspected of terrorism. She's on an estate of 153 acres outside New York, valued at $16m, and she is entitled to receive her salary of $900,000 a year. She can spend up to 48 hours a week planting her garden, shopping and riding, can receive friends and business colleagues - as long as they have no convictions. She will prepare her next two television series - one a new version of The Apprentice, in which she coaches would-be entrepreneurs as Donald Trump has done, and a daily show, just like her old one, in which she dishes out cookery and craft tips to the faithful.

In short, Martha is back, big time. She's been hailed as a folk hero, eulogised by feminists who claim that she was victimised in a way a successful man would not have been. While she cleaned floors and attended yoga classes in jail, the website SaveMartha claimed it received 50 million hits, and another, Marthatalks.com, on which she issued bulletins from prison, was a tremendous success. The appeal against her conviction is set for 17 March, but whatever the outcome, Martha has cunningly resumed her role as icon. Even her release was typical: as CNN broadcast an hour-long biography complete with footage secretly shot in jail by an inmate, the Queen of Clean popped on a stylish poncho and was whisked back home on a private jet.

As all political parties here talk of trying to woo female voters, they could take a few lessons in chutzpah from Delia and Martha. But ultimately it's depressing that these two single-minded businesswomen are held up as role models by anyone - from feminists to television producers. The pair of them made fortunes by exploiting female insecurities, trading on our need to please. We bought into the myth that domestic achievement is worth something. But when you're working for £5.50 an hour cleaning a hospital, serving school meals, standing in a shop or spending two hours a day commuting to work on crappy public transport, it doesn't seem that important knowing how to decorate a bread basket. For all the talk of serving the community now she's semi-retired, Delia has spent most of her life as a businesswoman. And as for Martha, if she really cared about women's rights and the appalling treatment dished out to those at the bottom of the ladder in America with poor education and none of her advantages, then she'd be running for public office and campaigning for the real women who need her help. Hillary Clinton might be an example to follow, but of course Martha is only ever interested in one person. Herself.

This might not be the most politically correct thought, but has it occurred to Margaret Dixon, the woman with the most famous shoulder in Britain, that she might not have to spend such a long time in intensive care when she finally has her operation if she could perhaps go on a diet? While I feel sorry for anyone suffering severe pain and anyone contemplating a life-threatening operation deserves sympathy, part of any consideration of her treatment must be that Mrs Dixon is several stone overweight. A fact the press has mysteriously glossed over.

The payment of £4,500 by the BBC to Brendan Fearon, the burglar who broke into Tony Martin's home, is grotesque. The producer of the programme claims it is in the public interest. The Lord Chancellor calls it "a disgusting warping of values" and the BBC's former head of editorial policy finds the sum "extraordinarily large". There is some justification for interviewing Fearon about why he changed his version of events the night Fred Barras, his young accomplice, was shot by Mr Martin. And if money is the only way to get him to talk, then the standard BBC fee for an interview like this is £200. This monumental sum needs to be the subject of an internal inquiry. I work for the BBC every week and know exactly what fees are paid to contributors. Surely someone should be sacked over this.