Melanie McDonagh

Happy Christmas…what’s left of it. That’s right. It’s the Epiphany, the twelfth day of Christmas, the one when my true love sent to me twelve drummers drumming, to go with the lords a leaping and ladies dancing, and the rest of the frankly inconvenient gifts for the Birth of Christ. Last night was Twelfth Night (we’re counting, remember, from the night of Christmas Eve); cue for festivities and party games chez McDonagh, and a Galette du Rois to celebrate the arrival of the Three Kings to baby Jesus, an event that looms large in more civilised Christian countries such as Spain.

Oh God. Or maybe not. There’s a letter in the Guardian today from assorted unbelievers asserting their right to a place on Radio 4’s God slot, Thought for the Day. 'It’s time for the BBC to open Thought for the Day to humanists. Religion doesn’t hold a monopoly on ethical worldviews. Humanists… make sense of the world through logic, reason and evidence, and always seek to treat others with warmth, understanding and respect…' Etc. It’s signed by Sandi Toksvig, Julian Baggini, the philosopher, agony aunt Virginia Ironside and Peter Tatchell. Plus 29 others. Consider folks. Is there a gap in your life that comes from not hearing enough of Sandi Toksvig?

GK Chesterton observed that “Blasphemy depends on belief, and is fading with it. If anyone doubts this, let him sit down seriously and try to think blasphemous thoughts about Thor.” And indeed this week began with an orgy of self-congratulation on the part of Irish pundits about the electorate doing away with a reference to blasphemy in the Irish constitution (no one would have turned out to vote, if the presidential election wasn’t happening the same day).

It is very hard to read the Times’s lead story today about the alleged sexual exploitation of a young autistic woman with the consent of her carers, a court and the local council. Perhaps I have an excess of sensibility, but it made me feel ill. The case, if accurately reported, strikes me as being in the Rochdale/Rotherham league of sexual abuse, except that instead of the female victim concerned being a young girl, she is autistic, 23, with severe learning difficulties and an IQ of 52.

The indignation over the disappearance of the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi has taken an interesting turn now that Donald Trump has promised to inflict 'severe punishment' on the Saudi government should it turn out that he was in fact tortured and killed in the Saudi embassy in Ankara – though not obviously to the point of cancelling US military contracts with the kingdom. And the indignation is entirely justified. For agents of a foreign state to infringe the human rights of its subjects in another country is a calculated insult to the country in question quite apart from the unpleasantness of exhibiting abroad the behaviour visited on critics at home.

In the final volume of his collected letters, Patrick Leigh Fermor recalls watching the wedding of Princess Anne in 1973 in Diana Cooper’s bedroom because she had a colour telly. “She was in an enormous bed, so we all lay on it side by side drinking champagne, watching the procession and the service. It was all very obsolete and indescribably moving; it is one of the few things – pageantry – that the English are better at than anyone (the only thing, it seems, at this moment!) A lovely morning.” Well, he could have done and said just the same today watching the wedding of Princess Eugenie to Jack Brooksbank, a former nightclub manager. Most of my office was riveted to the screens for the beginning, at least, of the happy event.

There was an interesting article in the Guardian today about one of the less discussed aspects of miscarriage: the language employed about it by the NHS. “How dare they call my lost baby a “product of conception”’ was the headline for Katy Lindemann’s moving piece about her miscarriage, where she describes how “a baby” – as her unborn child was described when still gestating – was, after dying in the womb and being surgically removed, referred to as the “retained products of conception”. She notes: “From the outset of your antenatal care, the NHS refers to “your baby”’ but not when he or she dies.

The great Quentin Blake, who illustrated the Roald Dahl books, has come up with some charming new illustrations for Matilda, the child prodigy who was so brainy she could make things move by sheer mind-power. For the 30th anniversary of the book, he speculates on what she might have become: there’s Matilda, world traveller, chief executive of the British Library, astrophysicist. Or maybe not. Alessandro Strumia at the university of Pisa has cast doubt on that last one. In an address at Cern, the European nuclear energy body, to an audience of women – grown up Matildas, all of them – he declared that the reason men are so over-represented in physics is because they are “over-performing” and that physics was “invented and built by men”.

There comes a point in the tsunami of abuse allegations about the Catholic clergy when you have to say, stop it right there. The latest cleric to have been accused of abuse is in fact dead: my friend, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, who died last year. A conservative Italian blogger – and by conservative I mean not a particular fan of Pope Francis – Mario Tosatti, and the website LifeSite, have claimed that Francis quashed an investigation by the Cardinal Gerhard Muller, into allegations against Cardinal Cormac in 2013. The allegations are from a British woman who claimed that, back in the 1960s when she was 13 or 14, she was abused by Fr Michael Hill, a serial predator, and by Cardinal Cormac.

To be honest, it’s hard to think of a report by a select committee that is so well-meaning as the one issued today by the Foreign Affairs Committee, headed by Tom Tugendhat, or one that’s more misguided. The gist is that Britain’s non-intervention in Syria has been disastrous for Syria itself and for its neighbours, from Lebanon to Turkey. And the moral is that if humanitarian intervention has a price, so too has non-intervention. As the report says: 'There has been a manifest failure to protect civilians and to prevent mass atrocity crimes in Syria. This failure has gone beyond the heavy toll paid by the Syrian people to the surrounding region, and had repercussions in Europe and the UK.