Damian Thompson

In the magazine a couple of weeks ago I asked if we were in the early stages of a Catholic civil war fuelled by confusion over Pope Francis's apparent willingness to soften the Church's pastoral approach to divorcees and gay people. Hostilities began during the disastrous Synod of the Family, at which liberal officials gave a press conference implying that the Church was about to admit remarried divorcees to Holy Communion and celebrate the positive aspects of gay unions. The synod fathers, furious at this hijacking of the proceedings, voted down every liberal proposal – leaving the Pope looking foolish. He has since sacked Cardinal Raymond Burke, the most truculent of the conservatives, from his post as prefect of the Vatican's supreme court.

Update: He's called Martin Wright and you can see a clip of him speaking here at a Class War event in 1985. In it he reveals that he used to support the National Front, which isn't a massive surprise, though he moved away from racism pretty quickly. Click through and you'll discover just how much anarchists hate Owen Jones. Martin – I've yet to discover his surname – is a hard-Left anarchist from the old white working class who hates Britain's liberal media. But not half as much as he hates Isis and its 'Gap Year Jihadists' for whom he won't shed a tear if they're wiped out by a drone. This YouTube video is a few weeks old but pretty compulsive listening. Note that sex gangs in the north of England crack a mention.

Fiona Woolf, as you can probably tell from her Maggie-Smith-in-yet-another-costume-drama photograph above, is a member of The Establishment. She's Lord Mayor of London. And a QC. Plus, she has been at the same social events as former home secretary Lord Brittan and his wife; is even sort of friends with Lady B, in common with hundreds of other well-connected people. That's the thing about being of a certain age and professional eminence – you keep being introduced to each other and occasionally show up at the same dinner parties. Take another example: Baroness Butler-Sloss. Her late brother, Lord Havers, was attorney general when Leon Brittan was in office. So you could say that she 'moved in the same circles' as the Brittans.

Heywood and Middleton is a far worse result for Labour than for the Tories: we can agree on that, surely. Clacton is grim for Dave, of course, but I'm interested in what happens in the rotten Labour heartlands. Here's something else for Ed Miliband to worry about: the SNP. Loathsome party, humiliated last month, but so angry and looking for revenge. The turnout in Scotland come the general election will surely be higher than usual. And much of it will be made up of occasional voters energised by the referendum. The SNP won't take safe Labour seats: they're hugely behind – we're talking 20-point margins. But the electorate has changed. Peter Kellner reckons the Nats could capture 26 seats, which is fanciful.

The former Bishop of Rochester, Dr Michael Nazir-Ali, has agreed to talk to members of Ukip about 'Magna Carta and the Perfectly Virtuous Pages of our History’. I blogged earlier about the bishop's bravery in calling on Rome to defend Christians from Islamism, and in the process endorsed the Catholic Ordinariate for ex-Anglicans. But this demonstrates courage of an entirely different order. The Church of England is divided on the subject of bloodthirsty radical Islam but of one mind when it comes to Ukip: They're the BNP in blazers and that's that. Vicars know perfectly well that members of their congregations will vote for Britain's new third party next year but they'd rather not think about it.

Well! Jonathan Freedland of the Guardian was impressed by David Cameron's conference speech and no mistake. The campaign for 2015 has begun. On Wednesday, in what may well have been his sharpest, most effective speech since becoming prime minister, David Cameron fired the starting gun. In the process, he lodged at least a couple of deadly bullets into the flesh of his Labour opponents. The result – whatever the polls might say – is that after a fortnight of duelling party conferences, Cameron’s Conservative troops believe they are marching towards a contest in which they now hold the advantage. That’s partly down to what the prime minister did in Birmingham. But it owes just as much to what Ed Miliband failed to do a week ago. Indeed, the two are intimately linked.