Melanie McDonagh

The prospects for peace on earth to men of goodwill - the original Christmas present — look a little slim right now, so by way of compensation, here's a perfectly fabulous recipe for something to go with your Christmas pudding. It's Mrs Hanrahan's Sauce from Darina Allen's A Simply Delicious Christmas. And frankly, it's so good, the pudding becomes merely a vehicle for the sauce. Here, and wishing you a happy Christmas, it is: 225g/8 oz. Barbados sugar (soft, dark, moist) 70ml/2 1/2 fl oz. port 70 ml/2 1/2 fl oz. medium sherry 1.3 litres/2 1/4 pts cream, lightly whipped 110g/4 oz. butter 1 egg Melt the butter, stir in the sugar and allow it to cool slightly. Whisk the egg and add it to the butter and sugar with the sherry and port. Refrigerate.

In the Kensington M&S where I get my lunch – the delicatessen has a very decent pork pie or Scotch egg – the business of queuing is a matter for snap judgments...if there's an empty till going with a human being on it (do I need to say why automated tills are a pain?) then you make for it before someone with a trolley does. So when I heard about the customer in a ‘central London’ M&S who got asked by the woman on the till to wait for someone else to serve her because of the champagne in her shopping, well, I had a kind of fellow feeling. What, start queuing again, if you've just managed to get served?

Must say, I felt a bit defensive when I looked at the tables of origin for immigrants to Britain for the decades to 2011, helpfully set out in  The Daily Mail. The real gist of the thing was the numbers – an increase from just under 2 million in the decade to 1951 to 7.5 million in the decade to 2011. But what was riveting was the immigrants’ countries of origin. For most of the time, the Irish led the field, with about half a million a year arriving in the course of each decade, give or take 100,000. In the last decade though, we were knocked right off our perch. At the top was India from which almost 700,000 people came during the ten years to 2011, followed by nearly 600,000 Poles and nearly half a million from Pakistan.

David Davis is plainly right that the Tories are just testing the water to see how talk about capping child benefit to two children for people on the dole goes down with the punters. And the predictable result is that the water isn’t really all that cold.  The suggestion has gone down nicely with quite a few, especially those – no offence folks! – who sound off on the internet. Any restrictions on welfare are popular; we know that. And it’s all too easy to think of examples of egregious fecundity on the part of people who we would probably prefer not to be parents at all: the child-killer Mick Philpott say, father of 17.

It’s no joke, having a Caesarean, and I’ve had two. So the news that Essex County Council social services obliged a pregnant, mentally ill Italian woman to have her baby in this fashion – normally, you talk the thing over with a consultant – was perhaps the scariest element of the case when I first read about it. I mean, unless there was a medical emergency, that would count as assault by most people’s reckoning.

Just over half a million people migrated to the UK in the year to June. And half a million the year before - actually, it was 517,000, but let's not quibble. A million, then, in two years...that's quite something. But you wouldn't have known from the news about the new immigration stats from the Home Office, which focussed instead on a rise in net migration to 182,000 (ie the number of people arriving, less the number of Brits leaving). Now, for all the noise about Bulgarians and Romanians coming to Britain, about half the new immigrants were from outside the EU - 242,000, down from 282,000 the previous year. You'd never think it though, to judge by the PM's obsessive focus on EU migration - which plainly is an important issue, but not the only one.

It was a curious coincidence, don’t you think, that the sexual conduct findings that the Lancet published today coincided with the publication of a report from the Deputy Children’s Commissioner, Sue Berelowitz, about child-on-child sexual violence? The two stories were juxtaposed uncomfortably in the news. In the case of the Lancet survey, which is conducted every decade, it was comically hard for broadcasters to know how to play the findings, which were a bit of a mixed bag. On the one hand women are becoming more like men and admitting to significantly more sexual partners – ‘of both sexes!’ marvelled John Humphrys, on the Today programme – than before. So yay!

Was any one actually surprised by the splash on immigration in yesterday’s Daily Mail? Its poll (of 1,027 people by Harris/Daily Mail) suggests that nearly two thirds of people think that immigration since 2004 has not been good for British society; eight in ten think that 176,000 net immigration last year was too much; and nearly eight in ten think that the public has not been consulted adequately about the effect of immigration on the population. Actually given that the last question was framed thus: ‘Since 1997, immigration has added 2.5 million to the population. Has the public been adequately consulted about this change?’ it’s surprising that only 79 per cent agreed.

George Bernard Shaw made no bones about the merits of schooling: it was, he felt, a way for parents to offload the care of their children onto other people, and he was right. The rich do this systematically, of course, in delegating their children to boarding schools, but for the rest of us, Ed Miliband’s plan to extend childcare provision by obliging primary schools to take in our children from eight in the morning to six in the evening will have a good deal of appeal. At least for parents it will; if I were a teacher, I’d take a dim view of having babysitting added to my other duties. But as Ed says, ‘…the cost of a nursery place is now the highest in history, at more than £100 a week to cover part-time hours.

It takes a lot to make the subject of immigration respectable for liberals, at least if you’re pointing out its problematic aspects. But Paul Collier, an Oxford economist specialising in the world’s bottom billion, has, in the 270-odd pages of his new book Exodus, opened up the issue for the left — well, for all comers, actually. Which, for a book suggesting among other things that, left to itself, there is no natural limit to immigration, is quite something. ‘The overwhelming reaction I’ve had,’ he told me, from his Oxford berth at the Centre for the Study of African Economies, ‘is that people thank me for making the subject discussable.

Most Coffeehousers are probably profoundly and justifiably cynical about anything masquerading as a consultation exercise in politics, so it might spread a little cheer to see how the Catholic Church goes about it. There’s been a surprising fuss – BBC news coverage; leader in The Times – about Catholic bishops consulting the laity about matters relating to the family. But although it is indeed quite something for the laity to be asked about anything (their views, mind you, aren’t conclusive, so nothing new there) the manner in which the bishops are doing it is fabulously anachronistic, gloriously uncompromising.

It’s not that often I feel a real bond with Richard Dawkins but no sooner did I read his diatribe about Osama bin Laden having won the global war on terror because he, Prof Dawkins, had had a jar of honey confiscated at the airport, than I realised that here was a kindred soul. The prof declared on Twitter over the weekend: Bin Laden has won, in airports of the world every day. I had a little jar of honey, now thrown away by rule-bound dundridges. STUPID waste. — Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) November 3, 2013   Ah yes, I’ve been there. Except the jar of forest honey – raw, lovely, village stuff – confiscated from me on my way back from Kosovo wasn’t little at all; it was full-size.

The outgoing chair of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, Lisa Jardine, has been paying graceful tribute to the woman whose report enabled the Authority to be set up: Dame Mary Warnock. She was, observed Prof Jardine, in an aural essay on Radio 4’s A Point of View, regarded as something of a philosophical plumber to the establishment, a woman who cleared away all the tiresome impediments in the way of getting things done with her practical, no-nonsense approach. And the Warnock Report of 1984 on in vitro fertilisation and its attendant moral problems was a case in point. Now, Dame Mary’s utility to the establishment as someone who can put a useful philosophical spin on any liberal consensus has indeed been invaluable.

Well, the whole Royal Mail privatisation is going terrifically well, isn’t it? I’m not talking about the pricing of the issue which has obsessed most of the pundits. I’m talking about users. The latest exciting new development from this privatised company with the Queen’s head on the product is that it is to use new technology to let companies know that their promotional material – junk mail as it’s affectionately known to its recipients – has been safely put through the door, so they are now free to cold call households to follow up the delivery. Nice! But it’s the impact on the price of stamps that really gets me going.

Well, Prince George has already done his bit for the Church of England. Simply by getting baptised he will bolster a sacrament that pretty well defines Christianity and is, like the state church which he may yet be head of (assuming disestablishment never happens), in sharp decline. In 1950, nearly 70 per cent of the population was baptised into the CofE, with most of the remainder christened into other denominations; in 2010 it was fewer than 20 per cent, and falling. Perhaps Kate Middleton can do for baptism what she does for Reiss dresses – bring it back into fashion.