Eton

Because, it says, of its ‘liberal values and respect for human dignity’, the Economist has put out a film about Emily, a 24-year-old Belgian woman, who wants assisted dying. She is physically healthy, and comes, the film assures us, from a happy family. She has suffered from severe depression since childhood, however. By her own account, her self-made video (two years ago), in which she says ‘I don’t want to live a lie’ and ‘It keeps feeling empty whatever I do’, made her feel empowered. It inspired her to seek death at the hands of doctors. Belgium is one of two countries in the world which permits assisted dying for psychiatric reasons.

How good a deal for Britain is it that the president of China got a state visit and a nuclear power station and Prince William got the chance to go on Chinese television and complain about the ivory trade? The Prince was listened to politely, of course, but the Chinese will not give up their enthusiasm for the stuff. The elephant in the room, to misapply that expression, is that only a legal trade in ivory will save the species. Just as cows exist in any numbers only because we eat their flesh and drink their milk, so elephants have a future only if it is profitable to breed them. Throughout the commodity boom that has now ended, Africa has done very well out of China’s demand for raw materials.

I'll keep this brief, but can the BBC please replace Ed Stourton as presenter of Radio 4's Sunday programme? He is an old Amplefordian from one of the great recusant families who, like many elderly Catholic toffs, holds 'progressive' views on faith and morals (though not education – he sent his sons to Eton). Fair enough, but he might at least go through the motions of hiding his bias when addressing Catholic issues on his dreary programme. Stourton has a particular downer on Bishop Philip Egan of Portsmouth, one of only two non-Magic Circle bishops who slipped through Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor's net (the other is Mark Davies of Shrewsbury).

Finally, just in the last few years I’d say, we’ve all begun to accept the role of nature in the great nature/nurture debate. Though we’ve squirmed and baulked, we mostly now do accept that genes inform (to a greater or lesser extent) not just our height and eye-colour, but our personalities: our intelligence, our disposition. We’re more like our parents than we are like strangers — and what, after all, was so very controversial about that? So now we’re at peace with our genes, here’s another mental challenge, a curious discovery by geneticists that’s even more at odds with our intuition.

Last week’s readers tea party at The Spectator was a delight. You always suppose that the people you’re writing for are interested, intelligent and nice....and there you go: they are. But after meeting them, I’ve been brooding about the importance of, how can I put it, charm, as a class issue. One attractive woman - who had been telling me how, in the Sixties, she thought something was wrong with her if she didn’t get groped on the Tube - encouraged me to move on with the observation: ‘I must let other people enjoy you’. Graceful and expert.

There was only one topic of discussion at the launch of Nadine Dorries’s novel Four Streets last night - will Maria Miller survive? The conversation was particularly pointed because Ed Vaizey and Helen Grant — Miller’s now former colleagues at the Department of Culture Media and Sport — were both present. They at least tried not to gossip. Vaizey was invited to speak by Dorries in his ‘capacity as a Culture Minister and a friend’. He gave a comedy turn; lavishing Nadine with praise for her ‘brilliant, brilliant book which I have not yet read.’ He continued: ‘I asked Nadine for a copy and she said you can buy it off Amazon — it costs the equivalent of about 18 and a half pints of milk, not that you would know, posh boy.