Melanie McDonagh

The Education Secretary, Gavin Williamson, is worried that children will go feral if they don’t get back to school sooner rather than later. Actually, that’s not quite how he put it. He’s let it be known that he’s worried about the lack of pupil-teacher interaction while schools are closed and that it’ll affect progress if they don’t reopen until after the Whitsun half term. Dead right, Mr W. My own children are 13 and 16 and frankly, I can’t see much difference between holiday and term time since the lockdown. One child was on Google classroom, which I thought – silly me – would be a kind of virtual version of an actual teaching session. In fact, it was nothing of the sort; the teachers set work and leave the children to it.

Last week I was put on furlough from my job, which was – in a way – quite exciting, invoking images of sturdy sailors on shore leave (my grandfather, who was a sailor, had his own approach to this; jump ship from a vessel in port if he fancied a change). Anyway, the largest bit of my present work is to review art exhibitions and since there aren’t any exhibitions to review, and there’s a limit to the number of times you can exhort people to have a look at the Hermitage online, I could kind of see the point. But now I’m thinking that I was actually dreadfully short sighted, not to say, selfish.

In Ireland at some point in the 1970s there was such a queue of people waiting to take their driving tests that the government of the day said, what the hell, there’s only one way to get rid of the backlog, and gave everyone with a provisional licence a full driving licence. The result was, as you might have expected: insurance companies registered that a shower of duds would be let loose on the roads that year and, for years to come, factored that into their equations when it came to assessing premiums.

Last night, when the Prime Minister made his address to the nation he declared that places of worship would be closed – thereby putting churches on the same basis as outdoor gyms. Today a statement from the Ministry for Communities clarified that churches should stay open, for private prayer. All good, Catholics like me thought. We can sit at the back of the church, in the presence of the sacrament, and say a few prayers. Yesterday I dropped into my parish church and I found one other person there, a young man kneeling before the altar, as I’d found him the day before – an oddly moving sight. On Sunday there were all of three of us in there, sitting not so much at a social distance as an anti-social distance, at other ends of the church.

Well, thanks a whole lot, Gavin W. The announcement that schools would close in England from Friday was pretty well inevitable when Scotland and Wales announced that this was the way they were going, but it doesn’t make the decision less tricky for parents. It’s not apparent that the move was made for reasons of clinical necessity – viz, that children were likely to cross infect each other and their teachers – so much as the reality that teachers were downing tools and simply not turning up. Certainly, that was the case with my daughter’s school, with a number of teacher no-shows, as well as pupils absences.

There’s been a shocked, wounded response on the part of pundits to the Church of England’s statement last week in response to the introduction of heterosexual civil partnerships. The Church observed that: 'for Christians, marriage – that is, the lifelong union between a man and a woman, contracted with the making of vows – remains the proper context for sexual activity'. Just to clarify, the statement went on: 'Sexual relationships outside heterosexual marriage are regarded as falling short of God’s purpose for human beings.' In other words, the CofE restates the Christian understanding of sex.

Sorry, I don’t believe it. The Office of National Statistics has concluded that one in five adults was abused as a child. That’s right; a fifth of us, or 8.5 million people. The research used data from the Crime Survey for England and Wales; the Department for Education; the NSPCC and the National Association for People Abused in Childhood. And the aim is to “provide a more complete picture” of the scale of child abuse in England and Wales. It’s all powerfully reminiscent of a similar body in Ireland, One in Four, based on the premise that an even bigger percentage, a quarter of us, are survivors of some variety of sexual abuse. (Its founder, Colm O'Gorman, was repeatedly assaulted by a priest.

There’s one thing to be said for the possibility of the reconvening of the Stormont Northern Ireland Assembly: it makes a fool of those of us who take a cynical view of these institutions as mere talking shops, opportunities for gamma politicians to sound off to their own side. Wrong. The thing has been out of action for three years to the day yesterday. And it was missed, if only as a means of approving public spending projects. There’s a formidable backlog of pay deals that’ll have to go through when it reconvenes, starting with the commitment to clear hospital waiting lists; that’ll cost up to £1 billion. Getting the nurses back to work (like those in the Republic, nurses in NI don’t scruple to strike) will cost another £50 million.

Let’s not get carried away. The Queen’s younger grandson may be decamping to North America with his lovely wife and baby but the Queen herself is very much in business; life goes on. It may certainly have been odd, not to say ill advised, for this headstrong couple to have announced their departure from Britain without a by your leave to anyone, including the Queen, but that does seem to be their modus operandi, all the while professing regard for the royal tradition in which they will be raising baby Archie. Personally, I haven’t felt that life has been greatly diminished by the absence of the couple for the last six weeks in Canada.

There’s been a lot of criticism about Jeremy Corbyn’s want of humility and refusal to apologise for his errors in the wake of his party’s annihilation in its former safe spaces. But rather less for Jo Swinson about the dismal showing of the Lib Dems in this election. This was epitomised by her own defeat by the SNP in Dunbartonshire (and if I were a Unionist, I wouldn’t be quite so gung ho about the results as most Tories). She went down as she went up, utterly immune to self doubt: “Liberal Democrats will continue to stand up for these values that guide our Liberal movement - openness, fairness, inclusivity. We will stand up for hope” You could say that this result was a resounding 'No to Hope', or rather 'No to Woke'.