Melanie McDonagh

Well, on the bright side, it seems that the Home Secretary and the Mayor of London are forgiving people, at least concerning offences that don’t concern them personally. Amber Rudd and Sadiq Khan have, as was universally predicted, decided that Cressida Dick should replace Bernard Hogan-Howe as head of the Met, the biggest policing appointment in the country, which includes its important counter-terrorism brief. It would seem, then, that no mistake can be too grave – not to say fatal, no error of judgment too egregious, no apparent loss of control in a crisis too serious, to disqualify someone from taking control of London’s police force.

Norma McCorvey, who died on Saturday, was unknown; as the Jane Roe in Roe v Wade, she became one of the most famous women in America, her name synonymous with abortion rights. When pro-choicers want to defend the abortion status quo, or pro-lifers want to overturn it, they’ll say it’s about Roe v. Wade. She was the woman who sought to have the restrictions on US abortion law overturned. Or at least, she and two ambitious female attorneys did. When she was 21, pregnant with her third child, she sought an abortion in Texas. She was referred to Linda Coffee and Sarah Weddington, who were looking for pregnant women wanting abortions in order to change the abortion law. Jane Roe was the pseudonym they gave McCorvey to protect her identity.

John Bercow is a little chap, and no harm in that, but does he really need to grandstand about his inviolable liberalism? Do we really need to know that 'opposition to racism and sexism' were 'hugely important considerations' in making him raise an issue which should have been left well alone, viz, the theoretical possibility that President Trump would address parliament in Westminster Hall? It wasn’t an issue, not really, until the Speaker sounded off about his opposition to it.

It has, to be honest, been rather hard to keep up with the flow of executive orders, policy pronouncements and big name appointments from the new US president: they’ve been coming thick and fast. So it’s been tricky drawing up any sort of running audit of debits v credits, though some changes, like the appointment of Jared Kushner to preside over the Israeli/Palestinian peace process, are sufficiently surreal to make you wonder why the Women Against Trump brigade didn’t put it on their placards. But there are pluses, depending on your point of view. And from where I’m at, Trump’s executive order reintroducing the 'global gag rule' – which sounds unhelpfully like a perverted circus turn - is one of them.

Why, do you suppose, are people getting worked up about the nepotism angle of Donald Trump appointing his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, as a senior policy adviser, with particular responsibility for the Middle East, when there’s so much else to worry about it? The one thing that should concern us is that it means that a friend of Benjamin Netanyahu, perhaps the most destabilising figures in Israeli politics, is now effectively in charge of policy in respect of the Israel–Palestine question. That’s right; Kushner is the young man who introduced Netanyahu to Trump.

The collective hysteria about the impending fall of eastern Aleppo to government forces strikes me as understandable and laudable only up to a point. If the advance of Assad’s forces on the rebel-held part of Aleppo means, as the French government suggested, the biggest massacre of civilians since the Second World War, then obviously it would be a very bad thing. But the spectacle of MPs and the BBC presenting the conflict as Assad and Putin’s lot trying to kill or starve little girls (there’s an eight-year-old whose tweets from Aleppo are widely circulated) and their mums without mentioning the overall nature of the conflict, strikes me as partial at best, stupid at least.