Melanie McDonagh

Alas, it looks like the return to third class travel won't happen. The papers had got terrifically excited about what seemed like a rolling back of 56 years, when British Rail finally ditched its working class fare. The story was on the back of the privatisation of the East Coast Line from Aberdeen to London, for which it seemed at least one of the bidders had envisaged another tier of fares, though it appears the Department of Transport has been thinking along the same lines for the last year. But of course it wouldn't have happened, a return to third class tickets. At least, not described in that dramatically honest and comprehensible way.

The Prime Minister and the Energy Minister, Ed Davey, were unanimous in their response to the British Gas price hike this week by 10 per cent, about four times the rate of inflation – described judiciously by the PM as 'disappointing'. Shop around! they said. 'We need more competition!' cried Mr Davey. They haven’t yet recorded their opinion of today’s price increase from little Co-op, another energy provider, at about twice the rate of inflation, but I expect it will be much the same.

Rather to my embarrassment, I find that I missed last night’s episode of the BBC2 three-part series on The Ottomans, Europe’s Muslim Conquerors, in which I briefly featured. So Heaven knows what I actually said in it; it’s been a while since filming. But I’m rather hoping that the point I wanted to get across did, viz, that it’s nuts, barking mad, insane, away with the fairies, for Britain to be agitating for Turkey to be part of the EU. On David Cameron’s last visit to Turkey in 2010, he expressed anger at the delay in Turkey’s admission to the Union and blamed opponents for playing on fears of Islam in order to advance their case. Which more or less mirrors the rhetoric from Labour on the same subject.

The establishment has a target in its sights; you can always tell from the tone of the Today programme. In this case, it's Northern Ireland’s abortion law. The occasion is the genuinely tragic case of Sarah Ewart, who travelled to Britain this week in order to abort a foetus with the most severe case of spina bifida, which meant it didn’t have a head. She didn’t want to carry the pregnancy to term and Northern Ireland’s abortion laws at present don’t allow for abortions where the foetus does not actually threaten the life of the mother. Not unlike the intention behind the 1967 abortion law here, then, which is meant only to sanction an abortion where the risk to the mental or physical health of the mother is greater than if the pregnancy continued.

Waves of apathy, a tsunami of indifference, engulfed Ireland for today’s constitutional referendums. When I was over there last week, I was more interested in the thing than anyone I met; the turnout in some places was one in ten – miles lower than in high-octane votes, like the ones affecting the EU. The main issue is the government’s proposal to do away with the upper house, the Seanad, or Senate, which reached its zenith of interest and relevance when WB Yeats was a member (his views on contraception and divorce make notable reading) and has failed ever since to capture the remotest public affection. If you think the House of Lords doesn’t really register with voters, well, it begins where the Irish Senate leaves off.

Now the latest on the Politicians Keeping In Touch front. It’s funny how it’s the wives who take the brunt of the endeavour. It was Samantha Cameron yesterday who had to parade at the Tory party conference in a teal £42 polyester dress from Asos.com…no question, then, of Mr Cameron being asked to take a turn in an M&S suit. Alas, Mrs C did what every sensible person does who has to wear something from Asos or Florence and Fred (and may I say, given their modest cut when it comes to fabric only skinnies can carry this off) and replaced their belt with one of her own. It was a matter of minutes before the eagle-eyed girls in the fashion departments of our finest newspapers outed this slim black number as from Emilia Wickstead, retailing at £196.

Do you know the name of Muhammed’s mother? No, me neither. I can manage the names of two of his wives and his Christian concubine, plus his daughter, but not his mother. The matter was, however, of more than academic interest when gunmen took over the Westgate shopping centre in Nairobi. According to witnesses, members of the public were lined up and then gunned down if they failed to name the mother of the founder of Islam or recite verses from the Koran. Those lucky enough to be able to speak Arabic — possibly passages from the Koran — were let go. The rest were fair game. Now, whatever else you can say about these individuals, I think we can agree, can’t we, that religion looms quite large in their world view?

You know Inferno, the new Dan Brown novel, the one that’s had such fabulously bad reviews? Well, it’s not really about Dante’s Inferno at all. What it’s really about — spoiler alert — is that old bogey: global population explosion. For the baddie, a genetic scientist called Bertrand Zobrist, the big threat to humanity is the inexorable increase in the world population to nine billion by 2050. ‘By any biological gauge’, he tells the head of the World Health Organisation, Dr Elizabeth Sinskey, whom he has lured into a darkened lecture room, ‘our species has exceeded our sustainable numbers… Under the stress of overpopulation, those who have never considered stealing will kill to provide for their young.