Melanie McDonagh

Can there be anyone curmudgeonly enough to take against Save the Children’s Den Day, a heartwarming event? – actually, make that an entire week, 29 May to 6th June – in which little children are 'being sponsored to transform their sofa, school desk or even a boring cardboard box into magical super dens. And the money they raise will help to save lives around the world.' What could be nicer and more harmless than to inculcate philanthropy in the young? Especially to help children like little Annie Mae in the Philippines, on the Save the Children website, made homeless in a typhoon and presumably obliged to make a den of her own, though not at all for fun.

Thank God for Dolce and Gabbana. Where other fashion designers play with their image like Mr Benn, the children’s character who adopts a different persona every time he changes his hat, they have a remarkably consistent – for fashion – way of looking at the world. It’s about family, the kind of families they had, of the Italian/Sicilian Catholic variety. So, their beautiful – and I mean really beautiful, not just freaky, unlike some – models are placed in the context of grannies, grandads, picturesque peasants and children – occasionally in first communion outfits. Their last show, which the fashion press loved, brought the house down at the end, when the models came on the catwalk holding or leading their adorable children.

There’s a vision of hell tucked away in the serious case review, commissioned by Maggie Blyth, independent chair of the Oxfordshire safeguarding children board. According to its reckoning some 373 girls were sexually exploited across Oxfordshire in the past 15 years. The review doesn’t quite do justice to the horrors of the ‘sexual torture’ and rape of girls as young as 13 by gangs of men who were almost all Asian and from a Pakistani and Muslim background. Girls who were, to some extent or another, ‘in care’. Never has the phrase so mocked itself. At any rate, not since the last reports on the exact same phenomenon of the sexual abuse of young girls by predominantly Asian men in Oldham and Rochdale.

Pope Francis, is, according to Cardinal Walter Kasper - a Swabian formerly responsible for ecumenism - neither a traditionalist nor a liberal - "both of which categories have become rather timeworn and hackneyed" - but rather a radical who wants to advance a revolution of forgiveness. Well, that's what Christians are kind of for, even if most of us fall rather short of the ideal. But though the liberal/trad categories may indeed be a bit hackneyed - possibly because they're completely and utterly lost on the secular majority -- it's not to say that the old agendas aren't still being fought over with gusto. And right at the top of the liberal shopping list is a married clergy.

Half a million people. That’s quite a lot, isn’t it? I mean, half a million here, half a million there, why, soon you’re talking a million, which is even more of a nice round figure. But that’s the statistic we should be talking about when it comes to the migration stats today from the Office for National Statistics. The crucial figure tucked away in there is in fact 542,000, which is the number of people who came to Britain in the year up to September 2014, excluding returning Brits. And of these foreign immigrants, non-EU citizens were the majority, 292,000 of them.

There is much to be said for Rod Liddle’s view that the fuss over the aspiring jihadi brides from the Bethnal Green Academy is getting on for preposterous and we shouldn’t, to put it mildly, over-exert ourselves to get them back. One takes the point, though I think in fairness we should spare a thought for those on the receiving end of the Isis recruitment drive, viz, the unfortunate indigenous communities in Syria and Iraq who are on the sharp end of Islamic State’s advance. I don’t know how many of the Assyrian Christians who didn’t manage to get away from the Isis attack this week on villages in north Eastern Syria were teenage or prepubescent girls, but I’d be a bit concerned about them myself.

One good thing has come out of the fuss over the pope’s comments about it being ok to smack your children (so long as their dignity is maintained); it has flushed out the former Irish president, Mary McAleese, as tiresomely conventional in much the same way as her predecessor, Mary Robinson - the very incarnation of PC. Shame, because I’d been a fan until I read her letter to the Irish Times on Saturday criticising the pope for his remarks, on the basis that they’re at odds with the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child which, apparently, has zero tolerance when it comes to corporal punishment. Actually, make that two benefits to flow from the row.

There was a remarkable report on Channel 4 news last night around a film by Mehran Bozorgnia, which featured an interview with half a dozen young Yazidi women from the Iraqi village of Kucho. They were taken captive by Islamic State, but managed to escaped from their stronghold of Raqqa in Syria. It was horrible beyond words: one young woman taken as a sexual slave spoke of Isis fighters breaking the arms or fracturing the skulls of girls who refused to cooperate, of the shame of forced conversion, of the girls begging their captors to kill them. Her captor was an Australian Isis member; his Yazidi slaves were in addition to his wife. A 30-year-old woman obliged to act as minder for the younger women spoke of seeing girls as young as nine or ten taken for sex.

Bit of a coup for Sarah Vine, Daily Mail columnist (and wife of Michael Gove), don’t you think? Her piece on date rape elicited a trenchant response from Harriet Harman, who was indeed mentioned in it. I can’t think of many politicians who get down and dirty with a columnist like that; mostly they loftily ignore the brickbats or deal only indirectly with the pundits by countering their arguments without attribution. Anyway, remarkably, Ms Harman isn’t letting this one go. Let me rehearse the arguments. Ms Vine had taken issue with the latest observations of the  Director of Public Prosecutions, Alison Saunders, who declared that men must be able to prove they had consent from a woman in cases of alleged rape.