Melanie McDonagh

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'.

Oh God. Is there no end to this madness? The fate of Jamie Griffiths is now known: he’s the teenager who touched – not groped – a girl he liked on two separate occasions last November on the arm and hip. The teenager was charged with sexual assault and now he’s been found guilty at Manchester and Salford magistrates' court; he’s on the sex offenders register for the next five years, he has to pay her £250 and do 200 hours of unpaid community work. Of course, with only a few newspaper reports to go on we can't be sure we know all the facts of the case, but it seems this is now the price you pay for an unwanted advance to a member of the opposite sex.

There’s a cultural problem at the BBC, isn’t there? The Corporation is trying to attract under-35s — the sort who don’t really listen to scheduled radio programmes and who probably listen, if to anything from the BBC at all, to Radio 5 Live. This is the most obvious way to explain what’s happened to Desert Island Discs. It’s the only possible reason why Lauren Laverne, DJ, pop musician, a face for television rather than radio, replaced Kirsty Young for her sick leave. The bad news is that Kirsty isn’t coming back. She was good: she knows everyone, she’s probing and she’s sympathetic. Given that the programme, with its brilliantly simple premise, has been going since 1942, this is an appointment people really care about.

Before you get too worked up about the £2.4 million cost to the taxpayer of refurbishing Frogmore “Cottage” for a family of three – one a baby – bear in mind to keep some indignation in reserve for next year. Because this is only the first instalment of the project before the costs have had a chance to overrun, and you know what it’s like with builders. Wait for the next financial year. The other thing is, this already-not-inconsiderable-sum isn’t actually necessary for the housing of Meghan and Harry in the style they feel they deserve.

Is the pope a Catholic? You have to wonder. In the old days, a pope’s remit was modest: infallible, but only in the vanishingly rare cases when he pronounced on matters of faith and morals concerning the whole church. But even at their most bombastic and badly behaved, earlier popes would have hesitated to do what nice Pope Francis has done, which is to approve changes in the liturgy which amount to rewriting the Lord’s Prayer. That bit that says ‘Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil’ is, for Pope Francis, a bad translation. ‘It speaks of a God who induces temptation,’ he told Italian TV.  ‘I am the one who falls. It’s not him pushing me into temptation to then see how I fall. No. A father does not do this.