EVERY time she was the subject of a budget report, some commentator – almost always a bloke – felt obliged to tell us: “the first female Chancellor in 800 years!”

To which the obvious ­riposte should logically have been, what took them so long? What was happening for the other 799? Could they not locate a numerate woman?

Meanwhile, across the pond, a woman of colour is in the fight of her life for the US presidency. Gosh, a woman! Golly gosh, a woman of mixed parentage! A very slightly darker adult human female! What next?

Her opponent, meanwhile, did an ­interview with disgraced former Fox “News” host Tucker Carlson in which, ­inter alia, he mused how Liz Cheney would cope with a firing squad. Liz, you see, had ­committed the unpardonable sin of ­suggesting her compatriots vote for Donald Trump’s ­opponent. In public at that. On your actual TV.

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Then again, the normal ground rules have never applied to The Donald. He lies as ­easily as he breathes and is rarely ­challenged when the porkies get larger and larger.

Compare and contrast the forensic ­manner in which every Harris utterance is scrutinised; every detail weighed as ­potential ammunition for the forces of ­media darkness. She’s having to deal with both sexism and barely disguised racism day and daily.

Kamala has gone big on women’s ­reproductive rights – a hot-button issue in a land where a woman’s right to control her own fertility was torpedoed by a ­Supreme Court where three Trump-appointed ­justices were in place for precisely that ­purpose.

(Image: Susan Walsh/AP)

The end of Roe v Wade ushered in an ever-loopier world where some states ­argued that disposing of unused foetuses was tantamount to murder, ditto ordering the morning-after pill.

As a giant billboard in the USA ­hollered last week: “If men got pregnant, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.” ­Precisely. ­Instead, men who will never have to take one of the toughest decisions of all feel able to pass laws which might imprison their wives, daughters and female relatives in a pregnancy they never planned nor wanted.

Instead, doctors and nurses who once pledged themselves to save and protect their patients are now too scared to ­offer lifesaving care lest they fall foul of draconian new laws. Instead, women are having to find the means to flee to one of those shrinkingly few states which might still offer them hope and treatment.

I have never had to carry a catastrophically damaged foetus deemed unlikely to survive to full term, but I can imagine no greater living hell. As would be a child born of a rapist whose features might be a daily reminder of the ordeal.

The idea that the Trump/Vance ticket is in women’s corners is risible, as is the insistence that the top of the ticket will look after the workers. Like the man who organised tax cuts for the super-rich is suddenly going to turn into a blue-collar fanboy. Puleeze.

The latest news is that Trump is ­minded – should he win – to “let loose” Robert Kennedy on women’s health, health ­generally, and food standards. That’ll be the RFK who is anti-vaccination, and prone to falling for any and every ­conspiracy theory. Every dynasty sports a bampot. Here, foxes and hen houses spring to mind.

You don’t have to be a paid-up ­feminist – though I am – to despair at how little even the most decent of men begin to ­understand a woman’s daily lot.

From the Helena Kennedy Scottish Government-commissioned report on misogyny, to the dearth of female ­talent in the boardrooms it’s clear that the so-called second sex gets the fuzzy end of most lollipops.

There was a revealing moment the ­other night on the Graham Norton Show, ­normally a congenial space wherein ­assorted celebs are encouraged to plug their latest wares.

And a few nights back they did just that. Denzel Washington, Paul Mescal, Norton and Eddie Redmayne all chuckling over Eddie’s recounting how he had to learn new tricks of daily self-defence for his movie The Day Of The Jackal, like using his phone as a weapon.

Finally, at the second time of trying, Saoirse Ronan managed to get a word in. That, she said, is what girls and women have to do all the time. Cue mildly embarrassed silence and a quick change of topic.

She does not lie. Women all over the world hesitate to walk alone in the dark. Sometimes they pretend to use a phone and pretend to be telling someone they’re almost home. Often they bunch their car keys in their hand in case of an unexpected attack. Or they scurry towards better lighting and enough other pedestrians to feel safer.

That is a stark reality which most men – even the most caring of them – never quite grasp. Because they themselves would never contemplate molesting a lone ­woman, they have a total failure of ­imagination that other members of their sex would feel no such compunction.

Apparently, that clip from the Norton show has, as they say, gone viral, mostly I suspect because women watching have shared it ubiquitously. The women in the audience gave her a loud cheer and the other three guests – all men – had the grace to look mildly shamefaced.

Those of us blessed to have had ­lovely dads and lovely husbands are not ­immune from this sometimes paralysing fear. Women who have not been ­similarly blessed are only too well aware that ­being the “weaker sex” means they can be ­overpowered at any and every turn.

Sometimes, in the last days of the ­run-up to the presidential election in the States, it seems it’s easy to forget that Trump has been found liable for sexual abuse and is a self-confessed abuser of women’s rights and most especially their right to have their own private space respected.

In a normal world, a woman who has served as a public prosecutor, attorney general and state senator would romp home against a convicted male rapist – one with an unsavoury business history to boot.

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It seems normalcy has gone out of fashion across whole swathes of America – a country in which I have spent many happy holidays mostly in the days when politics had some obvious ground rules.

Now it’s an arena where the UK Labour Party are dismissed as “far left” and Harris labelled “a radical Marxist”. If that’s not crazy enough, consider the fact that the man who says his country has failed, gone to the dogs, is a “third-world” entity, is apparently level pegging with a woman who says she takes pride and joy in being American.

Think for a moment how that would have played on July 4 if Starmer had ­insisted the UK was all washed up and Sunak had insisted everything in the ­garden was still nice and rosy.

Yet what happens on Tuesday is a ­result which will have worldwide ­consequences in the UK as elsewhere. It will ­matter to the battle for Ukraine’s future, it will ­matter throughout the Middle East, ­already in ferment.

Because the people to whose fan club Trump belongs are either authoritarian dictators – as he has promised to be – or stupendously rich like Elon Musk who is, however, smart enough to know that Trump, whatever else, is a sucker for ­flattery; who loves his outsize ego stroked.

A wheen of right-wing male hosts in America have apparently been appalled at the suggestion that US wives cast their vote for Harris in the privacy of the ballot box, and in the full knowledge that their husbands have voted for Trump.

Some have even suggested it’s akin to having an extra marital affair. Aye right, chaps! By the sound of things, these gals don’t plan to make the same mistake twice.