Melanie McDonagh

Pastor James McConnell of the Metropolitan Tabernacle in Belfast has gone and done it. He declared in a sermon that: "Islam is heathen, Islam is satanic, Islam is a doctrine spawned in hell”. Golly. Not since the Rev Ian Paisley got the boot into the pope as Old Redsocks and indeed as the Scarlet Woman herself have we heard anything quite so robust in the way of religious rhetoric. (Oddly enough, there was something almost lyrical about it; he had lovely cadences.) But the anti-popery tradition is precisely the context these remarks should be seen in. Evangelical Protestantism has a thing about false prophets; it also has a thing about telling it like it is.

Well, how worried should we be about racism? The British Social Attitudes Survey says 3 in 10 Brits describe themselves as “a little “ or “a lot” prejudiced against people of other races. It wasn’t just white people either. This brings us back to levels in the Eighties, though to be honest it’s only five per cent above the all-time low of 25 per cent in 2001. Not particularly surprisingly those most likely to admit to racial prejudice were male manual workers, though there was a rise in the numbers of male professionals in the category. Young people were less likely to admit to being racist – a quarter, by comparison with 36 per cent for the over-55s.

There is, you know, quite a bit to be said for having a personal email account for getting stuff off your chest, such as comparing a former girlfriend to a double-decker (don’t ask) and talking about big-titted broads. Any work inbox that your secretary automatically is privy to is, well, not quite the same as one that’s all yours. I’ve taken soundings on this sensitive subject from a friend of mine who is a really good PA, mixes with the mighty and all the rest of it, and she tells me that it’s actually difficult to do the job from her point of view if you don’t have access to the boss’s messages; you need to know what’s going on to keep on top of things.

listen to ‘Ed Miliband on the World at One’ on Audioboo.

    It matters; it really does, if meat from animals conscious when killed is being passed off on us by stealth by supermarkets, schools and restaurants. It wouldn’t be just an imposition on the squeamish but a large-scale taking of liberties by the big food retailers which would affect most carnivores in Britain who shop in supermarkets and eat in chain restaurants, viz, the majority of us. The Mail reported today that the default option for many retailers is to sell meat that has been ritually slaughtered according to Islamic requirements. And ritual slaughter can mean not stunning the animal before killing it. What we need to know is: what kind of halal – the Islamic equivalent of kosher - we’re talking about here.

The latest series of Andrew Rawnsley’s ‘Leader Conference’ on Radio 4 starts tonight…keenly awaited obviously. But having been on the programme a couple of times – though not, funnily, since I did a piece for this magazine about the difficulty a woman has in getting her oar in across the masculine timbre of Danny Finkelstein et al – perhaps I should disabuse you that this admirable series actually replicates what happens in a leader conference. It’s very good, as everything my old friend Andrew does, but just not quite the same as the thing itself. This, I may say, is something of a specialist subject of mine, on account of leader writing being my bread and butter and having done it for different papers.

Writing in the Spectator Diary some time ago, the evergreen Peregrine Worsthorne, observed that one of the things about getting on was that you ended up forgetting the reason why you believed things and ended up having to think things out all over again. I know what he means. A little while ago I was invited to be interviewed on Sky about my opposition to women having close combat roles in the Army. And you know how it is; you’re busy beforehand, you don’t have the chance to do research, you don’t have time to look up your original thoughts on the subject. And it dawned on me en route to Milbank that I couldn’t for the life of me remember why I was opposed to women fighting.

If there’s one thing a poet is good for, it’s memorable circumlocution, which is why Michael D Higgins (the D is crucial; people wouldn’t know who you were talking about if you mentioned Michael Higgins), the Irish president and ongoing poet, has been in his element during this state visit to Britain. ‘Ireland and Britain live in both the shadow and in the shelter of one another, and so it has been since the dawn of history’, he said during his speech at Windsor Castle. ‘The shadow of our past has become the shelter of our present’. That was good. The Queen was hardly to be outdone: the gag about it taking someone ‘of Irish descent’ to make her jump from a helicopter was lovely.

What form do you reckon the government’s consultation on cigarette packaging is going to take? Given that health minister Jane Ellison has said that the government’s intention is clear and the consultation short, I rather think it’s going to be like the gay marriage consultation – which ignored half a million objections to the thing in principle, and just focused on asking how to implement a decision already made. So this business of seeking out the views of ‘stakeholders’ is, I rather think, entirely cosmetic. I don’t know whether you could call me a stakeholder because I’m not exactly a smoker – I’ve never got the hang of inhaling – but I do like a nice cigarette packet.