I can’t help myself, I just love a girl who dares to be bad. In these boy-pleasing days when lap-dancing has been redesignated “empowering” and a good mother means a guilt-ridden one, it is thrilling to behold a woman who neither craves male approval nor fears female opprobrium.

The reviled star of The Apprentice Katie Hopkins is that rarest breed, an anti-heroine. How we love our antiheroes – Tony Soprano, Capt Jack Sparrow, any dozen detectives, Bond himself – flawed and ruthless mavericks all. But on the bad-girl team we only have Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct, Linda Fiorentina in The Last Seduction and Vanity Fair’s Becky Sharp – sexually rapacious, ambitious, self-serving, controlled, cruel and with twice the smarts of any man.

Katie Hopkins revels in a very unfeminine power: she qualified as an officer at Sandhurst, relishes beating men in press-up contests. She hunts down other women’s husbands, feasts, then spits out their bare bones. And, most subversive of all, she refuses to be defined or undone by her biology. She ran the New York marathon when a few weeks pregnant: “I said to myself: ‘If I’m meant to be pregnant I will be after this.’ ” Which, wow, is pure female Patrick (American Psycho) Bateman.

A grand villainess at least deserves a decent downfall. A dragon should be slain by a broadsword, not pricked to death with a hatpin. How dismaying that of all the reasons to remove Hopkins from the contest – her abrasiveness, an egocentricity so pure she only cared if her team won when she was leader, her obvious lack of interest in Amstrad plc – Sir Alan Sugar chose to use her children.

“I didn’t get where I am by playing Mummy,” she’d insisted. But, in the final boardroom, Mummy was the only role she could play. She had two little girls, S’ralan banged on, she was a single mum. How could she uproot them to Brentwood? What about her childcare arrangements? It was personnel politics more outdated than her Elnett hairspray.

In the real world, Hopkins might not have stood down; she could have lawyered up and, clutching the Sex Discrimination Act, be heading for an industrial tribunal. The Apprentice is, of course, only a game show. But since Big Brother declined into an irrelevant, unwatchable circus of freaks and mentals, The Apprentice has become the annual TV barometer of our nation.

Sir Alan Sugar is an old-school boss: his wife has never worked; his daughter left a position in his property division once she had her children. He sees family and business as equally important but utterly incompatible domains. Yet he claims only to do the programme to promote entrepreneurship, so he should consider what “business message” is being sent out to working mothers and the bosses who employ them.

The Apprentice has thrown up the question: to what extent is a mother’s commitment to her job compromised by her children? Are her family obligations greater than a working father’s? Clearly so, since Tre, a dad of two, was not grilled about how he’d cope with long Brentwood nights, and Kristina Grimes, the only other woman in the final five, was applauded because, with her son grown and away at university, there was no danger she’d be distracted from selling Amstrad antiwrinkle pens or whatever mission awaits the winner. Hopkins too declared herself a better long-term prospect because she had “done my children thing” and wouldn’t need “maternity leave or any of that bull”.

Is there any wonder that of women graduates born in 1970 only 40 per cent have children? Why not postpone the moment when motherhood puts a sceptical question mark over your office desk. And so a whole generation of women is flinging hopes and savings into the burgeoning IVF industry.

Maybe they should take heart from women such as Katie and Kristina. Don’t punt your fertility on a directorship that might never happen. Have your babies young, get the employer grief over early, then storm into your thirties, bad, hungry and ready to get even.

The “Madeleine factor” is, it seems, exacerbating our already critically high levels of parental angst. At half term my son, aged 11, went on an adventure holiday in Dorset that necessitated a three and a half hour train journey back to London. Could he travel alone if collected at Waterloo? I thought so. But at check-in we were told that of 100-plus children on the holiday every single one – except my son – would be picked up from Weymouth by their parents. Even the 16-year-olds.

At Easter, the organisers told me, many more children were put on to trains. But by May no parent was taking the risk. This week an NOP polled revealed that 14 was the earliest age at which children were allowed to go out unsupervised. This can only be set to rise.

I almost changed my plan, resolved to drive four hours to Weymouth (and back) to collect him. But what message would that have sent out? That he was incapable, which he is not. Or that a country train journey in broad daylight is too perilous. Other parents shook their heads and conjured up drunks, muggers and mysterious predatory strangers who might bundle him from the train. Or that he’d be baffled and scared by delays or cancellations. I felt like a Nasa scientist about to launch a monkey into space.

To go against the prevailing parental wisdom feels deeply irresponsible. My friend put her 11-year-old son alone on a train to Cornwall last summer to visit his grandfather. Spying a fellow mother sharing his carriage, my friend asked if she would keep out an eye for her son. The mother looked at her blankly and said “No”.

These days we do not feel our obligations extend beyond our own families. Other people’s children are not our worry. If neighbouring kids play outside our houses they are a pest and should get back in their gardens. We wouldn’t tell off a reprobate child and hesitate to dry the tears of a frightened one.

In the end, my son found another boy who was getting off just before London. As he stepped on to the Waterloo platform, he looked somehow taller and more adult. And I felt grateful to the other boy’s family for not succumbing to this climate of terror. Instead of blaming and judging we need to allay other parents’ fears and consider every lone child our concern.

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