Melanie McDonagh

Well, the great breadmaking debate hots up. David Cameron neatly sidestepped the heffalump trap that Nick Ferrari put in his path in an interview on LBC when he asked him the price of a Value Loaf in Tesco or Sainsbury. As you and I know, dear reader, Mr Cameron would no more eat that stuff than his own fingernails, and I for one applaud his good sense. If you can afford not to, don’t. But his elegant solution to the problem of not knowing that loaf-shaped carbohydrate costs 47p (he thought bread costs ‘north of a pound’, which is true of the kind he eats, only double that) was to say that he makes his own bread, from flour milled in the Cotswolds, a process which takes all of 30 seconds in a breadmaker as a way of getting his children to eat granary loafs.

The national treasure and naturalist, David Attenborough, has been pronouncing, yet again, on the subject of world population growth. In an interview with the Daily Telegraph he opined that the famines in Ethiopia are about too many people competing for too little land and in the circumstances it’s 'barmy' to address the problem by sending them bags of flour. The great thing about being 87 is that you can stop worrying what people think but Sir David seems unusually alert to the 'huge, huge sensitivities' about his opinions. And one is that: 'When you talk about world population … the areas we are talking about are Africa and Asia. To have a European telling Africans that they shan’t have children is not the way to go about things.' It’s a useful admission.

The bad news for fans of G.K. Chesterton is that there are moves afoot to make him a saint. The Catholic bishop of Northampton, Peter Doyle, is reportedly looking for a priest to promote his canonisation. Pope Francis is an admirer, too; he supported a Chesterton conference in Buenos Aires and was on the honorary committee of the Chesterton Society. So why is this a bad idea? Chesterton was, among other things, probably the most engaging apologist for Catholicism, long before he became a Catholic. His little book Orthodoxy is the best personal account of the faith you’ll come across — unabashedly subjective, wildly romantic, fundamentally right. His Napoleon of Notting Hill is a riotous magnificat of the small things which are great things.

The hunt, since you ask, is on for one of Stuart Wheeler’s three very pretty daughters – Jacquetta is a well-known model – to opine about their father’s off-message remarks about women being 'nowhere near as good as men' at chess, bridge and poker. This was in response to a question about why there are so very few women on company boards. Stuart Wheeler, UKIP treasurer and Douglas Hurd lookalike, went on to explain that both sexes are good at different things and 'you don’t necessarily want to impose a minimum of either sex at the top of any profession or at the top of any board'. Here Wheeler showed his engaging naivety. His observation was, of course, the contemporary no-say.

It may be pushing it to compare Philip Bobbitt with Indiana Jones, on the basis that a constitutional lawyer will never have the exotic and uncommercial appeal of an archaeologist adventurer, even if he does look remarkably similar. Then again, a profile of him in the New York Observer called him the James Bond of the Columbia Law School, which also suggests impossible glamour. But you can see why his students and reviewers come over star-struck. He’s a courteous, urbane, well-connected (nephew of Lyndon B.

The departure of Chris Huhne and Vicky Pryce from prison yesterday has its lessons for us all, on how to make the most of adverse circumstances. Certainly that’s the happiest view of the news that Vicky Pryce is to publish a book about her experiences, called Prisonomics… yep, usefully echoing the title of her previous book, Greekonomics. That one had the merit that Ms Pryce knew quite a bit about the subject, as a Greek and an economist; but her two months at the soft end of the penal system in East Sutton Park prison in Kent may not give her much of an insight into the condition of women in, say, Holloway, where she spent remarkably little time before being moved.

The Government’s bid to make Britain that little bit more like Australia, in a bad way, by requiring cigarettes to be sold in plain white packaging may well be announced on that annual irritant, No Smoking Day, next Wednesday. And for good measure, it may throw in a ban on smoking in cars carrying children under 16. The only upshot of that last one will be to make it that bit more difficult to get a lift for a child. I am not  a serious smoker. I can manage perhaps two or three cigarettes a year, Clinton style, but that’s enough to forfeit a premium rate of life insurance (actually a life insurance computer can’t handle a smoking rate of less than five a week). I don’t care at all for the smell of stale smoke.