"You'd think after 40 years things would have changed, wouldn't you?" said Jo Robinson, waving placards as her friends shouted: "Shame on you" at the dinner-jacketed crowds on the way into the Miss World beauty pageant.

The competition, won at London's Earls Court yesterday by Ivian Sarcos (Miss Venezuela), is 60 years old this year, and Ms Robinson is a few months shy of her 70th birthday. It is 41 years since she spent a night in the cells and a morning in the magistrates' court after storming the 1970 contest at the Royal Albert Hall. Stink bombs, smoke bombs and flour bombs were thrown. And now she is back to register her opposition again.

"Look what happens," she said. "What society expects from young women. There is terrible pressure put on them to look a certain way. I wear make-up, I want to look nice, but to go to such an extent as to have operations performed on yourself?"...