I would no sooner want to see a female James Bond than a male Miss Marple. While it is surely only a matter of time before a trans woman with a well-oiled moustache starts solving crimes on the BBC in a detective series JK Rowling won’t have written, in my mind 007 can only ever be the womanising old Etonian that Ian Fleming conceived of, with something “cruel in the mouth and cold in the eyes”.

It is not as if we haven’t got enough leading ladies on screen these days, anyway. Just look at Katniss Everdeen from The Hunger Games, Villanelle from Killing Eve and Carol Danvers from the Marvel comics. In fact, I’d argue that we have always had great female role models in film, from Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley, to my own childhood hero, Margot Kidder’s Lois Lane.

So while I wouldn’t agree with the MP who this week claimed that female actors taking on traditionally male parts such as the Doctor in Doctor Who is driving men to crime, I think he may have a point on male role models.

Nick Fletcher, the Conservative MP for Don Valley, was pilloried by the Left for suggesting that “female replacements” in shows meant the only characters boys had to idolise were gangsters like the Krays or Tommy Shelby from Peaky Blinders.

During a debate in parliament on International Men’s Day on Thursday, he said: “Look at the discussion around who will play the next James Bond. In recent years we have seen Doctor Who, Ghostbusters, Luke Skywalker, the Equaliser, all replaced by women. Is there any wonder we are seeing so many men committing crime?”

Naturally, he was widely mocked online, with the Labour MP Ruth Cadbury saying: “After a decade in power it’s clear that this Government have ran out of ideas to tackle crime if they’re looking to blame Doctor Who,” and the SNP’s Stephen Flynn jibing: “Could certainly do with someone replacing Nick Fletcher.”

Yet, as Mr Fletcher later clarified, the point he was trying to make – albeit clumsily – is that: “Boys and young men also need positive role models within the media, just as women do.”

He added: “Teachers, parents and carers need to teach young men and boys that males can make a positive difference.”

It is hard to argue with that. Part of the problem is that we are spending too much time depicting men as superheroes, wizards and death-defying super spies, rather than simply celebrating hero fathers.

I can think of very few modern films or TV shows that celebrate fatherhood, except perhaps the comical Daddy’s Home movies starring Will Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg. You have to go way back to the 1990s and early noughties to find properly paternal fare like Mr Mom, Parenthood, Mrs Doubtfire and Father of the Bride.

It is as if fathers have somehow fallen out of fashion amid all this virtue signalling talk of “toxic masculinity” and “rape culture”.

But if you really believe in equality, you have surely got to be a champion for men as much as women – and crucially for fathers as much as mothers.

I couldn’t help but wonder, as Labour’s Stella Creasy this week paraded her newborn son around parliament in a call for equal maternity rights for MPs, what on earth the baby’s father was up to.

It was only in July that Labour launched an “Equal Recovery Pledge” to tackle gender inequalities “supercharged” by the Covid pandemic, calling for an “end [to] the outdated and sexist assumption about Dad being at work in the office and Mum looking after the kids and doing the housework”.

What better example could there be of this policy in action than “Mr Creasy” providing the daddy day care, if even for one day only?

Part of the problem here is that women are still automatically seen as the default parent, which not only places too much of the burden on mothers, but also devalues the contribution that fathers increasingly make to their children’s lives.

Gone are the days of fathers coming home from a hard day’s work, dumping their briefcase at the door and asking “what’s for dinner?” without a thought for what the kids have been up to.

Today, as increasing numbers of women have gone out to work, men share more of the domestic and childcare responsibilities than they ever have.

So why aren’t we celebrating this, not least when we know how damaging fatherlessness can be to children?

It isn’t just that boys need positive role models in the media – they need them in the home too. The number of families with a lone mother in the UK has risen by 18 per cent since 1996, according to the Office for National Statistics.

Across Britain, 2.7 million children have no father figure at home, representing almost a fifth of all dependent children, according to the Centre for Social Justice think tank.

It released a report in 2017 which found that children with absent fathers were 80 per cent more likely to be involved in antisocial behaviour and 75 per cent more likely to be involved in crime.

I don’t quote these figures to stigmatise single parents – my husband and his two brothers were brought up by a lone mother when his father died when he was six. She, like many single mothers, did a phenomenal job.

But we are deluding ourselves if we think fathers don’t have an enormously important role to play or that two parents aren’t preferable to one, regardless of what the “progressives” might argue.

The statistics speak for themselves on this. When fathers are involved in their children’s early lives, children will score higher on measures of cognitive development by the age of five months. By the time they are toddlers, they will have better problem-solving abilities and at the age of three they will have higher IQ scores.

Children with engaged fathers are also 28 per cent less likely to suffer from behavioural issues as young children than those without a father figure in their life.

There is also a wealth factor to consider. There are 47 per cent of lone parent families living below the official “poverty line”, compared to 24 per cent of children in couple families.

Yet you don’t hear many lads leaving school declaring that they aspire to become a house husband. Girls still admit to wanting to start a family – even in the post-feministic era of women’s empowerment – but boys, not so much, despite the advent of flexible working and paternity leave. This is a missed opportunity.

If lockdown has taught us anything, it is the importance of the bond between fathers and their children. The Fatherhood Institute found that 78 per cent of dads reported spending more time with their children, while 65 per cent reported a better relationship with their children after the spring lockdown last year.

Ninety five per cent of British adults think that a father is vital to a child’s wellbeing and yet there still pervades a narrative that isn’t just anti-family but anti-child rearing too.

If it wasn’t bad enough that we have a narcissistic Instagram generation, brought up to think it’s all about “me, me, me”, they’re now being told that procreation is killing the planet.

On the contrary, the most important thing in the world is family.