Melanie McDonagh

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.

Generally, journalists shouldn’t talk shop about the press in mixed company. But an exception should be made, I reckon, for the Daily Mail, which has had for so long a unique place in national life as a political player in its own right. It gave a voice to a tribe: the socially conservative and it was, most obviously, the house journal and campaigning expression of Brexit: the full-fat version. All that changed when Geordie Greig, an urbane, likeable and intelligent Etonian, replaced Paul Dacre last year as editor, but it’s only now that the changes are really working through. This week, the Mail’s former parliamentary sketch writer, Quentin Letts surfaced in the Times, having left the Mail of his own volition, possibly not wholly enchanted by its volte face on Brexit.

Sorry. I just don’t believe it. The conviction of George Pell – still Cardinal Pell – last December, on which reporting restrictions are lifted today, isn’t credible; he’s appealing against it. Fiat Justitia and all that, but the problem with the rerun of this bizarre trial on five counts of child abuse in 1996 is that the implausibilities of the case against the Cardinal are as great as ever – in his first trial, the Catholic News Agency reported the jury was divided 10-2 in Pell’s favour. Here is what Pell was accused of: “The complainant said that he and another choir boy left the liturgical procession at the end of one Sunday Mass and went fossicking in the off-limits sacristy where they started swilling altar wine.