Melanie McDonagh

Exciting times for those of us who are fatter than we should be. The feeling of being put upon may be, at a stroke, translated into full-on discrimination status if researchers at University College London have their way. According to academics at UCL who’ve conducted research into the effects of fattist stigma, ‘shaming and blaming’ fat people is counterproductive and society needs to confront one of ‘the last socially acceptable forms of prejudice’. Their research proves that although two thirds of British adults are overweight and a third are obese, nagging and jeering at them only makes the situation worse. Tell me about it.

Well, what a coup for the No campaign. At least that was my first thought before I found, annoyingly, that it seems to have occurred to every Twitter user too (at least, so I’m told). Anyway, a new baby in prospect for the Cambridges and a PR stroke of genius for the Unionists – because we know, don’t we, that the entire Royal Family is squarely behind the Union and would simply hate for the monarch to have to negotiate a border the way James I et al had to. See Daily Mail, passim. Pretty English Kate, symbolically fecund, has at a stroke trumped the weekend polls. The Better Together campaign must be weeping hot tears of gratitude at this providential turn. That’s the unfair thing about the Royal Family.

Day two of the Rotherham scandal—or rather the fallout from the latest report on it—and there’s a marked, obvious change in the coverage of it from the last time the subject surfaced. It may be the sheer scale of the thing —1,400 girls, and counting—and the horror of the cruelties perpetrated on the victims, but I don’t think that anyone is now trying to evade the reality of the thing: that the perpetrators were overwhelmingly men of Pakistani Muslim background and the victims white.

It’s not often you can blame Samantha Cameron, Sandra Howard and Cheryl Cole for a social trend that blights the job prospects of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of men and women, but it’s out there. I’m talking about tattoos, which have travelled like inky climbing roses up the bare legs of countless Brits, from the bottom of society right to the top. Or from the top to the bottom, depending on your starting point. At one end of the social spectrum you have Cheryl Cole with that rose tattoo on her bottom, which she claims cost the price of a small car; at the other, you have SamCam’s little dolphin on her ankle.

Where to start with Prof Dawkins’ latest observations about religion and fundamentalism? In response to questions from an audience in Edinburgh where he was promoting his autobiography this week he observed that ‘nice’ religious people give credence to suicide bombers. It’s remarkable, really, that after a good eight years of debate and dialogue with people like Rowan Williams and Jonathan Sacks — viz, perfectly rational believers — he can still say the following: ‘...there is a sense in which the moderate, nice religious people – nice Christians, nice Muslims – make the world safe for extremists. ‘Because the moderates are so nice we all are brought up with the idea that there's something good about religious faith.

Yesterday, I had a succession of texts from one of the priests in my local parish, Mgr Nizar, who heads the Iraqi Catholic church in London, asking, with increasing urgency, what could be done for the Christians in Quaraqosh, in Ninevah, where most of Iraq’s  remaining Christians live. 'The situation is very bad,' he wrote. '200,000 Christians are displaced. All the Christian cities fallen in the hands of ISIS.' Another read: 'Our cities are empty now and the people on the street sleeping and nowhere to go.' The last time we spoke, he was agonised about the Christians displaced from Mosul, including most of his own family, under the threat of forced conversion or death by the army of the Islamic state, the one that several hundred young British Muslims have already joined.

To look on the heartwarming side, Australians have shown that they are rather more humane as a nation than the anonymous couple in the news for allegedly discarding one of the twins borne for them by a Thai surrogate six months ago. Scores of Australians have volunteered to adopt Gammy, the Down’s syndrome baby that was commissioned from Pattaramon Chanbua by an Australian couple only to be abandoned by his parents when they discovered his condition; they took  his healthy twin sister though (and the couple now deny knowledge of Gammy). The fund to pay for the baby’s medical treatment, generously funded by Australians, now stands at more than $180,000.

Last year I got my grouse at M&S. The birds, I mean. There’s a little fresh meat section in the Kensington branch round the corner from me at work, and it was dead handy to get game there when I was in money. In fact, if you want gastronomic popular elitism, grouse in supermarkets is as close as you get. Simply roasted with buttered breadcrumbs…nothing nicer, really. Tragically, the treat’s off this year.

If I were choosing a third parent for a baby, you know, I’d be inclined to choose one of the Williams sisters — the top-notch tennis players. If you want to create a baby with really classy metabolism — and metabolic function is just what the third parent provides — you may as well make it good. But what you can’t do, in creating a baby that’s able to process energy efficiently, is pretend that this is anything other than genetic modification. Yet the Department of Health, in effectively approving the three parent baby technique (actually, it’s always going to be two mothers plus one father), has redefined its categories in its proposals to allow mitochondrial DNA transfer. The proposals were published this week.

Before the election in 2005, the magnificently grand Polly Toynbee made a generous offer to Guardian readers reluctant to vote for Tony Blair after Iraq. ‘There is much to be proud of in voting Labour — but I have a free offer for the reluctant. On my desk is a basket of wooden nose-pegs marked "Labour". Any reluctant voter can have one of these to wear to the polls; apply here now,’ she said irresistibly. I seem to recall there was a bit of a run on them. I wonder whether the point has come for some obliging Tory journalist to make the same offer to disgruntled Conservatives. There is, of course, much for them to hold their noses about, notwithstanding progress on welfare reform. In no particular order there is: 1).

A doctor friend told me the other day that when he was taking a patient through her care programme plan – it’s now required for elderly and terminally ill patients – he asked her, as delicately as possible, how she wanted to die. She looked appalled. ‘But I don’t want to die,’ she said. And that is probably the view of quite a few Brits, notwithstanding our greater openness about death. Lord Falconer’s bill on Assisted Dying, which passed its second reading in the Lords on Friday and now passes to committee stage, has at least got everyone talking about dying, though I still can’t quite get my head round his pronouncement that the bill, if passed, would mean ‘less suffering, not more deaths’.

Well, it’s looking good for Esther, Liz and Priti, isn’t it? The one handle most of us have by now got on the reshuffle is that it’s one for the girls, an opportunity for the PM to remedy his woman deficit. Out with fatty Pickles, grand Sir George and genial Ken Clarke; in with go-ahead Liz Truss and the photogenic Esther McVey and the feisty Priti Patel. I suppose this swings and roundabouts business is fair enough, though as the Daily Mail rather wearily put it in its editorial yesterday, ‘ministers should be chosen for their talent, not their gender.’ Boring but obvious but true.

Well, I think nobody really assumed that George Carey was the brightest button on the bench of bishops but the old bumbler has still managed to put a rocket into the debate on assisted suicide. By dint of a former Archbishop of Canterbury changing horses on the issue, it has wrecked the notion that there’s some sort of consensus on the Anglican side about this contentious question. Whenever anyone tries to give a Christian account of the matter they’ll be met with the riposte, ah, but that’s not what the Archbishop says. But what gets me is the notion that it has come as a revelation to poor old George that there are potent arguments from compassion on the assisted dying side.

Last week’s readers tea party at The Spectator was a delight. You always suppose that the people you’re writing for are interested, intelligent and nice....and there you go: they are. But after meeting them, I’ve been brooding about the importance of, how can I put it, charm, as a class issue. One attractive woman - who had been telling me how, in the Sixties, she thought something was wrong with her if she didn’t get groped on the Tube - encouraged me to move on with the observation: ‘I must let other people enjoy you’. Graceful and expert.

There is, I realise, no perfect, neutral way of describing ‘assisted dying’, the substance of Lord Falconer’s bill which comes up for its second reading on 18th July. ‘Right to die’ is a bit tricky; dying is one of those rights that are thrust upon us without our even asking. It’s part of the human condition; just wait long enough, and it’s yours. And as Jenny McCartney eloquently makes clear in her piece on the subject, it’s actually assisted suicide — the assistance being provided by a doctor – or if you prefer, killing by request.