Melanie McDonagh

Was there some failure of communication, do you think, when the Czech billionaire Daniel Kretinsky bought Royal Mail (with the full support of government and opposition) last year? I only ask because it seems to have been taken aback by the full extent of its obligations – to deliver mail to every part of the UK and in the case of a first-class stamp, to do so, with some exceptions, by the next day. If you increase the cost of a service sixfold and reduce the level of service, it shouldn’t be a complete surprise if the number of people using it goes down This week we see the price of a second-class stamp go up 4p to 91p and first-class stamps increase by 10p to £1.80.

Five people I never met wished me a Happy Friday last Friday by email. You can pretty much be wished a happy anything nowadays, except perhaps Easter, since this assumes you share in the joy of the Resurrection. The London lights now say Happy Ramadan. Actually, if I were wished a Happy Lent it’d be the equivalent of telling me ‘Happy Abstinence’. The point is it is one more notch in the creeping commodification of goodwill, the conformity of niceness. Happy Friday is a way for strangers to introduce themselves on a note of cheer, since they’re trying to get you interested in an event or a product. But they don’t know you. It’s the assumption that you’re already friends that’s so galling.

The Sun, as ever, put it pithily: ‘Andrew’s Out of Line’, its front page says today. ‘Shamed Royal to be Axed from Royal Succession’. It is one of those facts of which nearly all of us were unaware until five minutes ago, that Andrew Windsor – can we drop the Mountbatten bit? – is in fact eighth in line to the throne, and until five minutes ago, none of us gave much thought to the matter because it was pretty well academic. That remains true, but I was brought up short to learn that ‘Andrew remains eighth in line to the throne behind the Prince of Wales and his three children and the Duke of Sussex and his two children’. Hold it right there. If by some tragic mishap, William and his children were to die, the country would be left with Prince Harry?

There are, you’ll note, two little words missing from the King’s statement on Andrew’s arrest on suspicion of misconduct in public office. It goes as follows: ‘I have learned with the deepest concern the news about Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor and suspicion of misconduct in public office.  What now follows is the full, fair and proper process by which this issue is investigated in the appropriate manner and by the appropriate authorities.  In this, as I have said before, they have our full and wholehearted support and co-operation.  Let me state clearly: the law must take its course. As this process continues, it would not be right for me to comment further on this matter.

Still they keep coming: email after email from Jeffrey Epstein’s personal correspondence, along with the almost unmanageable amount of other material in the Epstein files. They span two decades and an astonishingly wide range of topics: his Amazon purchases, missing laundry, the banning of his Xbox Live account, his reaction to photos of young women, how he considered potential plea deals and exchanges with famous people. There’s Sarah Ferguson’s message: To: Jeffrey Epstein [jeevacation@gmail.com] From: Sarah Sent: Sat 1/30/2010 10:22:44 PM You are a legend. I really don’t have the words to describe, my love, gratitude for your generosity and kindness. Xx I am at your service. Just marry me.

It takes a strong stomach to confront the details of the way in which Claire Throssell’s two sons – Paul, nine, and Jack, 12 – were killed by their father in 2014 after he was granted access to the boys by the family court. The case was explored in grim detail in Rob Rinder’s admirable crime show. This was a man whom their sons feared, but a family court judge made the decision to allow Throssell’s ex-husband unsupervised access to the children for five hours a week. The children did not feel safe with him. As their mother said, ‘he saw our children as possessions’.

Consider this: at a time when we’re agonising about the demographic winter and the unwillingness of Gen Z to procreate, something else is going on… There were nearly 300,000 abortions in the UK in 2023, according to the latest figures published by the Department of Health. So, whatever else the problem of insufficient babies is to do with, it’s not about a fertility crisis. Nor, does it seem, is it entirely about people not having sex. It’s rather a problem of women not wanting the natural result of sexual intercourse, pregnancy. If those pregnancies had or were to go to term, that is, if the babies in question had been born, we might have something near a million extra Brits in three years.

Time was, we took lessons from brute creation. Medieval bestiaries, books of beasts, weren’t simply descriptions of animals; these compendiums of their home lives and habits, mostly derived from a text called the Physiologus of the second century, were for the edification of the reader. The upshot of the research is that we are roughly two third monogamous, which puts us way ahead of dolphins and chimps 'But ask now the beasts, and they shall teach thee, and the fowls of the air and they shall tell thee', said the book of Job. The lion, being brave and kingly, represented Christ. Some animals had bad characteristics to avoid, like the duplicity of the fox.