Trolls spin a wicked web of vulgar vitriol

MARY Portas, retail guru and television's formidable Queen of Shops, made a chance remark in an interview last week.

- MARY Portas, retail guru and television’s

She had acquired her third child, she informed Jamie Laing of the Great Company podcast, using sperm donated by her brother, Lawrence. The baby was carried by her then-wife, fashion journalist Melanie Rickey, and born in 2012.

Cue internet eruption, venomous hurlings of "Incest!" "Freakery!" and "Weird!" and a surge in antiPortas invective blown out of all proportion to what was not even news.

In which festering cesspools had the haters and trolls been napping, because Mary had written about all that in her 2015 autobiography Shop Girl, serialised in a national newspaper.

Her former wife had given interviews about it too. There was no biological link at all between Mary's ex-wife and Mary's brother.

Mary had parented two children with her former husband. Melanie wanted one of her own for balance.