Melanie McDonagh

My colleague at the Evening Standard, the excellent cartoonist, Christian Adams, has been having a bruising time of it since his cartoon in yesterday’s paper was published. It features two leprechauns, Jeremy Hunt and Boris Johnson, capering around a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow – the pot bearing the legend: “no backstop”. It is quite plainly a jab at the illusory, fantastical and delusional notion – his view – that the Irish backstop can simply be magicked away, as both candidates intimated when they visited Northern Ireland yesterday. Plainly, the people being caricatured were Boris and Jeremy, not the Irish, nor indeed leprechauns. It was an Irish trope used against English politicians and visually striking.

Well! Just when it looked like the only political question anyone would be talking about is the start of the leadership hustings, what do you know? All anyone can think about is Boris Johnson’s row with his girlfriend on Thursday night. The one police were called to. Just after he’d seen off Michael Gove and the leadership contest seemed pretty well sewn up, now this: a proper row a plate-throwing, loud enough for the neighbours to hear every word sort of row. For anyone who hasn’t actually read the details, here’s the Mail’s account: 'Neighbours told last night how they heard plates and glasses smashing during a "proper tear-up" at the London flat Boris Johnson shares with girlfriend Carrie Symonds in the early hours of Friday morning.

Jeremy Corbyn’s right about Iran, isn’t he? On the attacks on ships in the Strait of Hormuz on Thursday, he tweeted (and don’t you just wish politicians could use a more considered medium?): 'Britain should act to ease tensions in the Gulf, not fuel a military escalation that began with US withdrawal from the Iran nuclear agreement. Without credible evidence about the tanker attacks, the government’s rhetoric will only increase the threat of war.' What, precisely, is wrong about that? What exactly about it caused the Foreign Secretary, Jeremy Hunt, to call him 'pathetic' and 'predictable'? Hunt himself didn’t exactly follow the US party line in announcing Iran was to blame for the attacks initially.

So it turns out that there may have been a quid pro quo behind Amber Rudd’s backing for Jeremy Hunt, her former political mentor, beyond the usual conversations about Cabinet jobs. Amber – who is for some reason that escapes me is considered a kingmaker – was interviewed this morning about one possible impediment to a shared world view between the two of them: Jeremy Hunt’s take on abortion, something that Amber says “is very important to me”. Of Hunt's view, expressed on Sky's Sophy Ridge on Sunday, that the legal limit for abortion should be reduced from 24 weeks to 12, she said it was his "personal, private view".  "That has always been his view," she said.

Well, very obliging of Donald Trump to back Boris Johnson – 'a very good guy…he’d be excellent…I like him very much' - in his interesting interview in The Sun, I’m sure. That’ll go down terrifically well with the kind of woke constituency that’ll be on the streets from Monday to make clear that the president is very, very unwelcome here; as it happens it also includes Jeremy Corbyn who is boycotting the president’s state banquet… though I don’t know whether he made clear that this is what he’d so if he were PM, which is kind of worrying. Happily, Mr Trump made clear he doesn’t much care. Anyway, will Mr Trump’s endorsement cut any ice with Tory members?

There’s nothing wrong with radio continuity announcers; one is a friend of mine and he’s very sharp. But the doubts about whether reading the news and the jokes between one item and another is a qualification to present programmes that actually require you to know what you’re talking about remain, now that Kathy Clugston has completed her first session as presenter of Gardeners' Question Time. She’s got nice diction, Kathy, but as a gardener she hasn’t got a clue – and in fairness she did let this be known at the outset. She started off by getting her audience at Tiptree in Essex to shout out – on the basis they live near a jam-manufacturers – whether they put jam or cream on their scones first.

The Guardian has an advertisement today from Sainsbury’s. Nothing wrong with that; respectable paper, respectable retailer. It’s the nature of the ad that’s interesting: a big bubble saying Save 10p per litre of fuel, surmounted by a picture of a petrol pump nozzle. You can see were the problem lies, can’t you? This is the paper that’s sympathetic to Extinction Rebellion, to Greta Thunberg, to the anti-fossil fuel activists who campaign against the British Museum accepting funding from BP, now giving space to a company flogging petroleum cheap, thereby stimulating consumption.

It would take a heart of stone – and occasionally I possess just such an organ – not to feel sympathy for Shamima Begum after she lost a third baby, her son Jarrah, barely three weeks old, in a Syrian refugee camp. But should we feel guilt as well as compassion for leaving the child – all unbeknown to him, a British citizen and possibly Dutch too – to fester in the camp occupied by IS refugees? More precisely, how responsible should the Home Secretary, Sajid Javid, feel, having deprived Miss Begum of her British citizenship? The BBC news all day long has linked him to the death: criticism of Javid as child dies. That’s its line. Diane Abbott has been keen to draw a link.