After Rashid Ali had declared an alliance with Nazi Germany in Baghdad in April 1941, the British stormed Basra again – just as they did in March – and lost hundreds more men as they drove Iraqi troops from the port city in 1941.According to the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, whose director- general visited Iraq two months ago, there are ambitions plans to restore the Basra cemetery, to re-erect new headstones and place the names of the 1914-18 war dead back on the wall.In fact, the commission was preparing the rehabilitation of the North Gate British cemetery in Baghdad – with the permission of Saddam’s government, of course – when the latest invasion began. The British cemetery contains 2,551 burials, 74 of them unidentified, of soldiers who stormed ashore in Basra in 1914 at the start of a British-Indian campaign that eventually captured all of Iraq from the Ottoman Turks.Somewhere amid the bracken, for example, lie the remains of Major George Wheeler VC of the 7th Hariana Lancers, killed as “this gallant Officer” – so his official citation says – single-handedly charged the Turkish standards at Shaiba on 13 April 1915. The Iraqi son of the old caretaker told me that his father was, for many years, too frightened to enter the graveyard.Yet here lie the bones – both literal and historical – of imperial adventures that have much in common with our most recent invasion of Iraq. They came under sustained shellfire during the eight-year war that followed Saddam Hussein’s insane 1980 invasion of Iran, and looters stripped the place of brass and stones in the aftermath of the Shia Muslim revolt against Saddam in 1991. But if the great British and Indian cemeteries at Basra are a disgrace, their fate was probably inevitable. Still visible at the bottom is the inscription: “We shall meet again in a happier place. Mum.”A few metres further is the memorial to Leading Seaman FC Smith who died aboard HMS President III in March 1943, a break in the stone running through the last lines of Binyon’s “Poem for the Fallen”: “At the going down of the sun and in the morning/We will remember them.”The ruined Indian army cemetery opposite contains an unknown number of bodies whose numbers and names were – to the shame of the British Empire for which they died – never recorded.

Not far away is the stone erected in memory of Aircraftman 1st Class KG Levett of the RAF, who died on 31 October 1942. The soldiers of Britain’s forgotten armies of Iraq lie beneath the dirt and garbage of Basra’s official war cemetery, almost 3,000 of them, their gravestones scattered and smashed, the memorial book long looted from the entrance, even the names of the dead stripped from the screen wall. Here lies Sapper GW Curry of the Royal Engineers, for example, who was 31 when he died on 5 May 1943 His gravestone is broken, lying on its side. Until this new reality is recognised, a lot more men are going to be checking into the Priory – because like the put-upon housewives who once preceded them, they are trying too hard to be “good” and ending up hurting themselves – and everyone else in the family – in the process.Tim Lott, a father-of-three, is an award-winning novelist and broadcaster whose latest book, “The Love Secrets of Don Juan”, is about a divorced ad executive struggling to be a good father. Child-rearing in middle-class homes is much easier than it used to be, and paid work in the professional class is probably harder. Irrespective of the objective workloads, it has become a given that if a man doesn’t do exactly half of everything when he gets home from work and at weekends, he is a dinosaur and a loafer.In reality, as in race, true equality means being blind to biological differences This means sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. In lower-income families, and with more children, the one stuck at home – almost invariably the woman – undoubtedly has it hardest.

And women are still under-represented in the workplace, and underpaid when they get there.But the fact that the Priory Clinic is now identifying a new breed of put-upon men who are cracking up under the strain of trying to be both worker bees and good Queen bees suggests to me that a double standard is operating.And I know a good few men who fall into this category – like the previous generation of women were pressured to be Superwoman, now they have to be Superman. So deep does the ideology run that woman with kid at home = bored/put upon/oppressed, that the more modern middle-class reality, taking into account paid help, labour saving devices and so on, counts for little in the face of it.I am not making the point that women have it “easy” They don’t. She refuses.What would be most people’s reaction to this scenario? I suggest that they would probably think that the man was a sexist and the woman well within her rights to refuse.However, reverse the genders and how does it look then? I would say that it still looks like the man is being sexist. Then he tells her to make the child supper, give him or her a bath and put the baby to bed.After that, she can help him make some dinner for them both and do the washing up afterwards.