Damian Thompson

The subject of identical twins has been on my mind ever since I read a magnificently creepy thriller called Ice Twins by SK Treymayne – a pseudonym meant to sound like a woman, but it fact belonging to the novelist Sean Thomas. I read it because Thomas is in the new Spectator Life explaining how the pressures of the market push the writers of psychological thrillers towards female-sounding names – so he (sort of) turned into a woman to make Ice Twins a bestseller, which it duly became. The book is tightly plotted, meticulously researched and I urge you read it – but what grabbed my attention was the subject of that research: identical twins. Lydia and Kirstie are monozygotic twin seven-year-olds (i.e., produced by a single fertilised egg).

The US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention have launched a wildly expensive campaign against e-cigarettes because... well, I can't really work out their logic, but the sickly aroma of liberal puritanism is unmistakeable. The medical arguments are risible. The Wall Street Journal reports: Print and radio ads starting Monday target e-cigarette users who continue to smoke traditional cigarettes. They depict an e-cigarette user named Kristy alongside a caption that reads: 'I started using e-cigarettes but kept smoking. Right up until my lung collapsed.' So it was vaping that caused Kirsty's lung to collapse, was it? Nope: it was smoking cigarettes. Of which she did less because she also vaped, but for reasons that aren't explained she kept on smoking.

[Update: On looking more closely at the list of priests, I'm astonished by some of the names I see there – clergy I wouldn't have described as conservatives, let alone traditionalists. It reinforces my sense that vast numbers of priests, however much they admire Pope Francis, are worried about the direction of this pontificate – or, rather, its lack of direction.] Cardinal Vincent Nichols has slapped down nearly 500 priests who signed a letter to the Catholic Herald expressing concern about the Synod on the Family this October, which is to debate sensitive questions of sexual morality.

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).

The weekend brought yet another warning by an American website about Ritalin. Addiction.org wants people to know about the dangers of the 'abuse' of the drug when it's taken OTHER THAN PRESCRIBED. The capital letters are theirs – but the quote marks around 'abuse' are mine because I think the distinction between using and abusing Ritalin is somewhat artificial. As, indeed, is Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), the condition for which an estimated two million children in the US receive the drug – named, I kid you not, after 'Rita', the wife of the chemist who concocted it.

Phew! I was worried that the smear campaign against Cardinal George Pell mounted by the pigs at the Vatican trough would persuade Pope Francis to water down Pell's plan to impose proper accounting procedures on the Curia. But today Francis published the legal framework for the reform and – well, I can't improve on the reporting of the Vatican correspondent of Crux website, Inés San Martín: Pope Francis decided the future of his financial reform on Tuesday, issuing a new legal framework for three key oversight bodies that largely confirm the authority of the man he put in charge of his clean-up operation, controversial Australian Cardinal George Pell.

Ever since Cardinal George Pell was appointed by Pope Francis to clean up the Vatican's finances, I knew a hit job was coming; and I was doubly certain when he spoke up for orthodox cardinals when their views were being trashed by the liberal organisers of the chaotic 'Carry On Synod' on the Family. The Sydney Morning Herald, no fan of Pell in his days as Archbishop of Sydney, has accused him of 'living it up at the Holy See's expense'. They cite leaked documents purporting to show he rented an office and apartment in Rome at a cost of £2,580 a month – which, unless I've got the figures wrong, isn't very expensive. Plus £1,270 on 'religious robes'. Oh, for God's sake.

Dr Derek Yach has done more than any man alive to eradicate smoking. A former professor of global health at Yale, he developed the World Health Organisation's Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, now in effect in almost 180 countries. He has relentlessly drawn attention to the slippery tactics of the tobacco industry, which promotes its products while ostensibly lending its support to anti-smoking campaigns. But his article in today's Spectator Health breaks ranks with former colleagues in the WHO, which disapproves of e-cigarettes and other vaping products. Their 'intransigence' threatens the lives of millions, he argues. As matters stand, a billion people will die from smoking-related diseases by 2100.

Question Time last night. My colleague Cristina Odone of the Legatum Institute  is explaining that 'some of the most inspiring teachers who taught me were not out of teacher training college... they taught real values'. And a snooty, taunting voice interrupts her. 'But these were nuns. They were nuns, weren't they?' That word 'nun' was larded with contempt. The voice belonged to the Honourable Tristram Hunt, the square-jawed narcissist who serves Ed Miliband as shadow education secretary and cannot conceal his desire to succeed him. This is the same Dr Hunt who wants to clamp down on five-year-olds using the word 'gay' inappropriately. Presumably he's also opposed, quite rightly, to talking sneeringly about Muslim women wearing the hijab.

[audioplayer src="http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_5_Feb_2015_v4.mp3" title="Brendan O'Neill and Cambridge Union president Tim Squirrell debate the new political correctness" startat=33] Listen [/audioplayer]I wonder how many of you know that you’re cis. Not very many, I’m guessing. So let me break this gently. You are almost certainly cis. It is short for ‘cisgendered’, which means that you ‘identify’ with the gender you were assigned at birth. To put it in everyday language, you were born male and are still male, or were born female and are still female. Roughly 99.7 per cent of human beings — including gays, lesbians and bisexuals — are cisgender.

When Ofsted inspectors allegedy asked primary-age girls at Grindon Hall Christian School, Sunderland, whether they knew what lesbians did in bed, they (apparently) received insufficiently detailed answers. Also, pupils displayed scant knowledge of Hindu festivals. Now the free school has been placed in special measures. It may be that Grindon Hall is a nest of Christian fundamentalist bigotry. I rather doubt it, though. Likewise, I'm unconvinced – to put it mildly – that St Benedict's Catholic comprehensive, Bury St Edmonds, 'failed to promote British values' by neglecting citizenship classes. A better explanation comes to mind. Having claimed the scalp of Michael Gove, 'the Blob' is bouncing jubilantly around the Department for Education.

Catholics should not breed like rabbits and gender theory is a bit like the Hitler Youth. Yup, the Supreme Pontiff is giving another of his in-flight interviews and yet again he leaves everyone shaking their heads: 'He said what?' Now, let's be clear. Francis reaffirmed Catholic teaching on birth control (sort of) while observing that 'God gives you methods to be responsible. Some think that – excuse the word – that in order to be good Catholics we have to be like rabbits. No.' I know what he means. I think. Contraception and family planning are fine so long as you don't artificially block procreation. But the subliminal and unintended messages are (a) that Catholics have a reputation for breeding like rabbits and (b) birth control is OK, full stop.

Just before Christmas, virtually unnoticed by the media, the German Catholic bishops made a plea for the readmission of divorced and remarried Catholics (or Catholics married to divorcees) to Holy Communion. That it should be the Germans, led by Cardinal Reinhard Marx – Archbishop of Munich, president of the German bishops' conference and coordinator of the Vatican's Secretariat for the Economy – is no coincidence. In 1993, the future Cardinals Kasper and Lehmann asked the Vatican to admit couples in irregular marriages to Communion – indeed, to allow these couples to make up their own minds as to whether they should receive the sacrament. Cardinal Ratzinger kicked that proposal, and with it the liberal German Church, into the long grass.

How many of Pope Francis's spiritual diseases do you suffer from? The pontiff laid out no fewer than 15 of them in an 'exchange of Christmas greetings' yesterday. They included 'spiritual Alzheimers', 'existential schizophrenia', 'working too much', 'planning too much', 'working without co-ordination' and, above all, 'the terrorism of gossip'. I did a quick check and found two I definitely don't suffer from: working too much and 'feeling immortal, immune and indispensable'. It reminds me of the narrator of Three Men in a Boat who, on leafing through a medical dictionary in the British Museum, discovers he suffers from every ghastly malady except housemaid's knee.