Few of us, I think, would rejoice in having a person in Batman suit for a father. Particularly when the twerp in question has a record for harrassing the mother of two of his children and was allegedly overheard, more recently, bragging about the prodigious number of women to have enjoyed the favours bulging to one side of his Batman knickers. And yet Jason Hatch of Fathers4Justice has got himself quite a distinguished following.  Yesterday, in these pages, Hatch and his comrades were even likened to the suffragettes. Who obviously missed a trick in not going in for fancy dress. For although F4J's children's party costumes are sometimes deprecated by those who go on to approve its campaign, it seems unlikely that anyone would have warmed to the men, even taken much notice, had they performed their various feats in civvies. In ill-fitting, babyish outfits that contrived to make them look more little-guyishly plucky (or creepy) than oikish, they elicited support and admiration from the most unlikely places.   Bob Geldof, meanwhile, thinks them "great and brave". One of our leading young historians urges them on. Even the law-abiding Daily Mail can't resist this nifty new angle for getting one over on women, whose intransigence has apparently created "these men driven to desperate measures to get their stories heard".   Although one could easily get the impression that the main reason for the stories is to get the desperate measures on telly. If we didn't know, from numerous interviews, that Hatch has the interests of two of his children at heart, his penchant for sneaking up, or into, forbidden places might look more like a hobby than a cause. In another era, perhaps he and his mates would simply have gone out poaching or ratting, grumbling about bloody women along the way.  Today, for men who crave camaraderie and thrills but can't afford to go shark-fishing or bungee jumping, Fathers4Justice presents itself as inexpensive, all-male extreme sport, with the added frisson that comes of its also being a crusade and a covert operation. If only more of its members were still cohabiting, it would be a brilliant way of getting away from her indoors. "Could you change the baby, dearest?" "Sorry love, the lads are expecting me on Clifton Suspension Bridge. Where's my Batman suit?"   (Actually, it seems that Hatch, last seen acknowledging the crowds from one of her majesty's ledges, is already in the doghouse. Gemma Polson, the mother of their seven-month-old daughter, has reportedly left him, and says: "Fathers4Justice has taken over his life. He had told me he was going to give it all up - but then he goes and does this at Buckingham Palace." If only he had chosen angling.)   Naturally, the ambitions of Fathers4Justice go beyond seeking satisfaction for its premier activists. On its website, the organisation introduces itself as "a new civil rights movement campaigning for a child's right to see both parents and grandparents". Which would not be such a bad idea, if the rights in question weren't going to be enforced by warring adults. And there is, it turns out, a reason why F4J is not called P&amp;G4J. In practice, "parents and grandparents" turns out to mean a "dad's army" which the organisation has been, as it puts it, "mobilising" to fight the authorities which support "recalcitrant mothers".   Remarkably little evidence is produced to account for this declaration of war. While it is true that some mothers behave vengefully and deny their children's best interests, there is nothing to support the view that such behaviour is either prevalent, or officially approved. On the contrary. A new government green paper, "Parental separation: children's needs and parents' responsibilities", notes that most "non resident-parents" have weekly or more frequent meetings with their children. It finds that in around 90% of cases, child contact arrangements have been agreed informally by separated parents, of whom, more than 80% profess themselves happy with the arrangement. This does not, in short, conform with the F4J blighted vision of "a nation of children without parents and parents without children".   In reality, where there is dissatisfaction with the arrangement this is often because the resident parent - usually the mother - thinks there has been too little, not too much, contact with the the father. If F4J's main concern is genuinely that children should see both their parents, it has launched its dads' army at the wrong sex.   Compared with the number of men who say they want but are denied contact, says Gwen Vaughan, the chief executive of Gingerbread, "there are far more fathers who have no contact with their children whatsoever". The men have dropped out of their children's lives. "The idea that mothers are bleeding fathers dry and refusing them access is certainly not the main picture that we see," she says. "They would like more, not less, supportive parenting involvement from their ex partners."   If Fathers4Justice is happy to rest much of its case on anecdotes told by individual, often justifiably embittered members, it is surely reasonable to point out that there are many other stories to be told, in which mothers heroically put aside their personal feelings about unreliable, abusive, violent, or possibly criminal former partners purely for the sake of their children. There are more in which fathers, for all that they claim to have their children's interests at heart, use the courts to prosecute a feud with an ex-partner.   Since children are not, as Lord Falconer has pointed out, to be divided up like CD collections, it is not terribly surprising that when these cases go to court many more parents profess themselves unhappy with the outcome. They must have been pretty unhappy before they got there. Those of us who have never been through one of these ghastly battles like to point out, the more piously the better, that such parents really ought to put personal animosity aside. But if they can't, the courts will have to do it for them; occasionally deciding that shared parenting, in this battleground, may no longer be the best outcome. Even so, where parents go to court for contact, only 0.8% are refused. But this sort of objection is unlikely to make much difference to the F4J men's approval ratings, at least while mothers seem so reluctant to dress up as cartoon figures and throw purple condoms at people.   Still, we can agree with Mr Hatch and his gang on one thing: the children's interests should come first. Which means all the fathers in themed romper suits must get down from the walls immediately, stop showing off, and behave nicely. And what goes for them goes for everyone who has been encouraging this silly nonsense. At their age, they really should know better.  Back on song, Blair tries to woo us back Whatever the TUC felt about the content of Mr Blair's address to them on Monday, they should surely feel flattered to have been the beneficiaries of what seems to me to have been, if not one of the great Blair speeches, certainly a hint that we may expect, come conference, a return to glorious, shameless form. The glimpse of a Blair in full song was there not only in his bold reworking of Shakespeare - "I come here to praise Warwick not bury it. To advocate social partnership not belittle it" - but in a plangent bit of phrasing that seems to be his very own: "Even if I've never been away, it's time to show I'm back."  Assuming Mr Blair did not copy this off the inside of a greetings card with a little bear on the front holding a pale blue balloon and saying "Sorry!", it suggests an intriguing new shift in his rhetorical style, from the visionary who gave us a "new young country" to a sadder but wiser kind of guy who hopes we can learn to love again.  A bit like Steps in Since You Took Your Love Away: "I need to find a way back, And I don't know if I'm strong enough ... You took your love, oh baby, no I need you." Could Blair's TUC phrase even be a quote from one of his own, as yet unpublished, songs? "Even if I've never been away, it's time to show I'm back, ooh yeah baby,    Even if we used to disagree, There's nothing I can do about Iraq, I'm sorry baby ..." Can't wait.