Melanie McDonagh

You know, I’m not sure the new, in-by-a-squeak Tory MP for Croydon, Gavin Barwell, has quite got it right when he says that 'London is turning into Paris', what with the rich dominating the centre and the poor pushed to the suburbs. If only. Obviously, it’s true that there’s a species of social cleansing going on in the rich boroughs but it’s more subtle than that. I went to see my favourite facialist in Belgravia this week – she’s fabulous; she comes from the East End and her granny used to make her shoplift as a child – and the view from Motcomb Street is alarming. Because so much of it is owned by the Grosvenor Estate, it’s at the mercy of ever increasing rents – I ask you, does the Duke of Westminster actually need more money?

A Telegraph journalist, Lucy Denyer, has written about how rubbish it is that people are calling their children stupid, made-up names. (Spoiler alert: I’m anti stupid made-up names.) Trouble is, while she hasn’t exactly gone the Fifi Trixibelle/Peaches route herself, she has called her son Atticus. And no, it’s not the friend of Cicero she had in mind; it’s the bloke from To Kill a Mockingbird. Difficult one, Atticus. Classical names like Titus, Marcus or Octavia do dangerously expose your child’s class background, increasing their chances of getting beaten up.

Beatrice Elizabeth Mary. Anne Elizabeth Alice Louise. Elizabeth Alexandra Mary. These are the full baptismal names of Princesses Beatrice, Princess Anne and the Queen respectively. And what use are any of them other than the first one in each case? Today the papers have worked themselves up into a state of mild hysteria over the Cambridges' choice of name for their daughter. Charlotte: fine, one for Prince Charles. But the Elizabeth and especially the Diana bit really got them going - the child's third name merited an entire front page in the Mail. Diana won't be forgotten, says her 'closest friend', Rosa Monckton. Well, fine.

Every morning on the way to work I pass a group of Polish builders waiting to start work on the new Design Museum. I know, it tells us a great deal about the availability of British youth for work in construction that every last one of them is Polish, so far as I can make out – and come to that, are the Irish nowadays too swanky to be navvies? -  but what’s interesting is how well behaved they are. They smoke heroically, but when women walk by they register their existence but don’t utter a peep. Possibly it’s because their English isn’t good enough for Wotcher, darling, but they don’t wolf whistle either, which I assume is a lingua franca. It’s not just me, I may say; it’s the same with teenage girls.

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.