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It may be churlish to be unkind about a young couple who have just announced their engagement but needs must. Someone has to say it, though let me say at the outset that the engagement has made lots of people very happy. Not least journalists. Prince Harry is fifth in line to the throne so constitutionally it doesn’t matter a hoot who he marries because neither he nor his children are going to become monarch, but, for what it’s worth, Meghan Markle is unsuitable as his wife for the same reason that Wallis Simpson was unsuitable: she’s divorced and Harry’s grandmother is supreme governor of the CofE. The last person who made any personal sacrifice for that particular principle was Princess Margaret, and you could argue it didn’t end terribly well.

Last May we had dinner with a comic who reads a lot and his wife. At one point, he told Catriona that he had just finished a novel that he had enjoyed more than anything he had read for a very long time and he would like to lend it to her. He disappeared into the house to fetch it, and returned empty-handed and cross. His wife confessed that she was reading it and hadn’t quite finished. His wife loves to watch telly more than read novels, so this was a surprise. And here she was refusing point-blank to give this one back because she hadn’t finished it. The comic was furious; she was obdurate. Catriona could have the book when she had finished it and not before. A few days later the novel appeared on a bookshelf in the house, lying sideways.

For many years, the grandson of the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, Tariq Ramadan, has been one of my closest enemies. In Switzerland and France this Islamist dauphin had a slightly hard time establishing his reputation. This was not just due to his poor scholarship (the basis of which lay in a fawning book about his grandad) but also to his double-speak in public debate and (at best) borderline Islamist views. In France these views were most famously exposed in a television debate with Nicolas Sarkozy in which Ramadan infamously could not bring himself to condemn the stoning of adulterers outright, merely calling for a ‘moratorium’ on the punishment. https://www.youtube.com/watch?

Oh, the glorious hypocrisy of it all – the dozens of actresses, UN goodwill ambassadors among them, who have come forward to make accusations against Harvey Weinstein – and yet whom said not a word between them when they were on the make and he was in a position to help them with their careers. I should say that if you are important and mature enough to serve as a UN ambassador you ought to be brave enough to report wrongdoing that is going on beneath your nose – and not wait until there is a bandwagon on which to leap.

It’s all a long time ago now isn’t it?  All of three days since someone put a bomb on a London Underground train and then stepped out of the carriage.  Thankfully the detonator went off without managing to trigger the main bomb, which isn’t a mistake we can hope for every time.  30 people were injured on the District Line on Friday morning.  But if the bomb had done what it was meant to do then those 30 people wouldn’t have been treated for relatively light injuries.  Instead, bits of their remains would have been gathered together in some order and put into the dozens of body bags ordered for them and others at Parsons Green station. It remains strange how fast we pass over all of this.

I’ve been in Los Angeles for the last week, and it takes a special set of occurrences for someone to return to the UK from LA and think that Britain is getting a bit weird. Yet we appear to have managed it. While I was away there was the row about Jacob Rees-Mogg expressing his adherence to the Catholic church’s views on social issues (over which he has no legislative control). Then there was a row about whether it is bigoted to see any differences between boys and girls, and whether children can or should ‘choose’ which gender they are.

Which, do you reckon, is more repellent – the decision by Tower Hamlets, a borough rotten to the marrow, to place a Christian child with two successive Muslim foster parents of uncompromising Islamic views, or its reaction to the Times’ coverage of the story yesterday, with a council spokesman saying that its fostering service “provides a loving, stable home for hundreds of children every year”? Both, I’d say, are par for the course.

As a child in Glasgow, I learned that sticks and stones might break my bones but words didn’t really hurt. I’m now at New York University studying journalism, where a different mantra seems to apply. Words, it turns out, might cause life-ruining emotional trauma. During my ‘Welcome Week’, for example, I was presented with a choice of badges indicating my preferred gender pronouns: ‘he’, ‘she’, ‘they’ or ‘ze’? The student in front of me, an Australian, found this hilarious: ‘Last time I checked, I was a girl.’ Her joke was met with stony silence. Later I realised why: expressing bewilderment at the obsession with pronouns might count as a ‘micro-aggression’.

It started as displacement activity, my immersion in the market mayhem of the summer of 2007. I was at home looking after my wife Sian Busby and our youngest child. Sian had just been diagnosed with a horrible cancer, and was recovering from radical surgery. She did not want a fuss. And did not want our friends to know the seriousness of what had happened. So in the absence of being able to talk about it, I needed a distraction. So in the study across the hall from where Sian was convalescing, I tried to work out what the hell was happening in global debt markets. What I needed to understand was the mounting mistrust of investors for all manner of what were called asset-backed securities, especially those manufactured from low quality loans to US home buyers, or subprime loans.

Over the weekend I, like a good dozen others, endured the Twitter rage of Nassim Nicholas Taleb, an old man who rolls around like a drunk trying to prove he’s still the toughest hombre at the bar. He’s the sort of guy who screams at the Cambridge classicist Mary Beard: https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/892736047519608833 He’s the sort of guy, who, when I and others objected that bragging about his citations was a ‘crass’ way to behave, cried: https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/893079278870548481 He’s the sort of guy who when I replied: https://twitter.com/NickCohen4/status/893098347875246082 Can come back with: https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/893807860278317057 He’s that hard.

So farewell, the Mooch. One of the most bizarre figures to walk on to the stage of the Trump tragicomedy has just been shoved off – lasting just ten days. It's the doing of John F Kelly, a former Marine Corps general who was sworn in as Trump's Chief of Staff this morning. His first act upon returning to his office after the swearing-in ceremony was to fire Scaramucci. Just a few days ago Anthony Scaramucci boasted said that he was going to be doing the firing. ‘What I’m going to do is, I will eliminate everyone in the comms team and we’ll start over,’ he told the New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza. Well, now he himself has been eliminated.