Melanie McDonagh

Remember, remember the fifth of November. Except it’s not really possible this year, is it? Given that we’re not even allowed to meet up in our gardens, the chances of anyone watching an effigy of an unfortunate 17th-century gentleman go up in flames today are zero. In one way, I can’t say I am sorry. Guy Fawkes night is a very Protestant feast; when I was growing up in Ireland we’d never have celebrated the execution, following torture, of a man whose chief objective in seeking to blow up parliament was to secure greater freedom for Catholic worship. See Alice Hogge’s cracking book God’s Secret Agents about the sense of thwarted expectation following the accession of James I that led to the plot. But that’s beside the point.

Oooff! If you’re to go by Twitter — not always a good idea — there’s one thing not to like about Amy Coney Barrett, Donald Trump’s potential nominee to replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg and that’s her religion: Catholicism. The Washington Post’s Ron Charles quoted her saying that ‘a legal career is but a means to an end...and that end is building the kingdom of God’. Cue for others to pile in to the effect that there’s meant to be a separation of church and state in the US, and others witheringly observing that it’s not far to go from here to overturning Roe v. Wade. You can expect the quote to be widely circulated in the next few days.

If the Proms director, David Pickard, thought he’d get away with fiddling with Land of Hope and Glory at the Last Night of the Proms, boy, he knows better now. Yesterday, the Proms publicity people put out a statement deploring social media commentary about its plans and explaining: 'The Proms will reinvent the Last Night in this extraordinary year so that it respects the traditions and spirit of the event whilst adapting to very different circumstances at this moment in time.

Just when you think it’s not actually possible for the Government to get things worse when it comes to schools and Covid, along comes Ofqual to make a fool of you by proving that yes, it is indeed possible for them to make an even bigger mess of things. Today we found out that it will be possible for GCSE students next year to do English literature without any poetry. Ofqual, under its head, Sally Collier, consulted schools about whether they felt able to offer the same subjects as normal; not wholly surprisingly they said they didn’t…apparently they expressed 'significant concern' about their ability to cover all the subject areas. Well, knock me down with a girder. So teachers can drop either poetry or the nineteenth century novel or fiction and drama after 1914.

Mary Wakefield’s piece in today’s magazine – How the Catholic Church betrayed the dying – is right and eloquent in pointing out that there were Catholics dying in hospital from Covid who weren’t given the last rites for the absolution of their sins and the viaticum, the eucharist or food for the last journey. It is the least the Church can do for the faithful: to give them absolution of their sins at the last. However, in giving the bishops a very needful rebuke, she perhaps didn’t have space to do justice to the work of priests on the ground and in hospitals.

This week would normally be the time when state and private schools go their separate ways, when privately educated children go off on their holidays while the state school lot carry on for another couple of weeks of term. Except this time, the divergence happened in March, when lockdown started and the educational apartheid began, between rich and poor – or at least, between those who can afford fees and the not so well off. At that point, private school pupils went online for their education with school days running pretty well as normal; state school pupils ceased to have any education at all apart from homework set online, which might be marked, or might not, depending on whether the teachers felt like it.

Andrew Morton is being a bit previous, isn’t he, in suggesting to the Telegraph that the Covid crisis means that the Queen has more or less abdicated? Or as he puts it: ‘The brutal truth is that her reign is effectively over. Covid-19 has done more damage to the monarchy than Oliver Cromwell. Corona has practically put Charles on the throne.' And there was the rest of the country thinking the Queen has actually been rather brilliant during the crisis, giving that televised pep talk to the nation and presiding – at a distance – over the VE day celebrations with her very own service hat on the desk beside her, a living link between past and present. The psychological importance of the Queen to the equilibrium of the nation is, I’d say, very considerable.

So, the Government has abandoned plans to bring all primary school pupils back before the summer holidays, in addition to the two cohorts who have already returned. The opposition of teaching unions and some regional authorities and mayors have seen to that. As for secondary schools, only two of their year groups are returning; no plans for the rest. You do realise what that means, don’t you? It’ll be nearly six months off school by the time the remaining pupils get back at the beginning of September. It’s a long time, isn’t it? And as I’ve mentioned previously, it’s an especially long time if you haven’t had any actual lessons. As everyone keeps pointing out, it’ll consolidate the existing problems of disadvantaged groups.

You’d think that any measure that would help to get people out spending would be all to the good, wouldn’t you? Well, not so. The government’s latest genius idea for rebooting the retail sector is to abandon Sunday trading laws for a year, at least in the case of the larger supermarkets. Those laws at present mean that Brits cannot actually spend the entire day of rest shopping; just six hours of it. Rishi Sunak and Dominic Cummings are both said to be all for the idea, which, I suppose, makes it a shoo-in. Personally I think it’s an abominable idea. For starters, the likelihood that at the end of the year, Britain will revert to the status quo ante is precisely nil. It’s far more likely that the laxity will extend to the entire retail sector.