Single mums never used to exist.

Not because every mother was married, but because there were better, more descriptive, terms for them.

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After wars they were called "widows". To police they were "the victim". In divorce courts, more often than not, "the plaintiff", trying to call a violent, vile or vagrant husband to account.

But this is the sort of problem you get, when the one awful journalist who disgraces every newsroom ends up being Prime Minister. That one hack who can't hack it, the journo who does not journalise, the person who cares less for the people they write about, and the impact of their words upon their lives, than they do the people they are trying to please.

Promoting such a person always leads to disaster. Promoting them to Number 10 might be entertaining, but then so is feeding cats into a mincer. The mess it makes simply isn't worth the bother.

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After Boris Johnson's 1995 Spectator article on "the appalling proliferation of single mothers" was unearthed, there were plenty who said it was 24 years ago, it was written as entertainment, and oh-my-word-you-lot-take-offence-at-anything.

I'm a single parent. So let's not ask me. Let's ask my grandmother, a married mum who kept the home fires burning while her husband was fighting his way across northern Europe in the Second World War.

She spent 3 years raising a child alone. She did it without a NHS, without employment rights, and without once being accused of of having a desire to "procreate without men" or to "marry the state".

No politician suggested the millions of single mums that war, and all those before it, created should be subject to "sure-fire destitution on a Victorian scale" to deter them from falling pregnant – often completely intentionally – with no guarantee the father would ever return.

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The child she raised was not "ill-raised, ignorant, aggressive and illegitimate". She was a grammar-school kid to whom no policeman has ever raised an eyebrow.

Or let's ask my Kentish great-grandmother, whose husband spent more time working or in the pub than he did at home, how she feels about a mother doing all the parenting. In her case, for 10 children, two of whom died before puberty.

Or we could ask my Danish great-grandmother, a teenaged single parent in a strict, religious society. She was abandoned by the father, gave birth anonymously, and had to give her child to foster parents, because no-one would employ her otherwise. Court papers show her chasing the feckless dad while he pleaded a poverty he wasn't in.

She moved to Britain, trained as a midwife, and brought her daughter over to join her later. On both sides of my family, the women – single and married – worked damned hard to raise their children.

Barack Obama was raised by a single mum. He seems to have done OK.

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We could go back even further, to my many-times great-grandmother whose husband was transported to Australia on a poaching charge, following the mass starvation that followed the Swing Riots. She raised her family alone, until a second marriage. Or her daughter, who was a maid for the local squire and was impregnated by one of his posh chums who did not stick around to acknowledge his child.

If any of us look at our family trees, we would find women unmarried, widowed or abandoned, who took life on the chin and worked hard to raise their families as best they could. Many have moralised at them over the years, but the central complaint has never been borne out by the facts: if lone parenthood destroys society, we should have eaten each other by now.

What Boris the bad journalist missed is what Boris the bad PM still doesn't get. Everything traditionally blamed on single parenthood merely proves a correlation, not a cause. Children of single parents are more likely to do worse at school, and as adults, not because of how they were raised, but because they were raised in poverty.

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When religion or society denounced lone parents, it carried financial punishment. It meant you could not work, could not rent, were more likely to fall into hardship and addiction and even, if you read Victor Hugo, prostitution.

Single parents – dads or mums – have rights and freedoms now, but still have to work harder at it. They do not get a day off, don't have the chance to say "it's your turn, I'm out". There is no choice, for them, about whether to discipline or cuddle, or whether the money they earn justifies the hours they're not at home.

All of you who parent as a duo are allowed that. It is possible for one of you to be an idiot, sometimes or all the time, if the other picks up the slack. You can choose whether to have one income, or two. For 2million of us who go it alone, through choice, accident or bad luck, all we can do is our best.

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In the 21st century I can be pretty confident that my little one will grow up in a good area, not a sink estate. She'll have access to good schools, and plenty of support at home to achieve her potential.

But then I have the benefit of knowing what Mr Johnson does not. That many generations have raised their children alone when men showed "reluctance or inability" to be "head of a household". That those children all contributed to build the society we now enjoy, and in which we can all work, buy property, and have a right to self-determination of the sort that was denied to almost every woman, and most of the men, who came before.

Perhaps if Mr Johnson paid more attention to people, rather than playing to the hard-Right gallery of goons he has courted for 30 years, he'd understand why childcare, equality and basic human decency are the three things everyone could vote for.

If he'd ever asked anyone a question, and listened to their answer, he'd know that already. The only bastard around here is Boris Johnson.

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General election 2019

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