Melanie McDonagh

All right, he’s eaten dirt. Andrew Mitchell, Chief Whip, has now apologised to the Prime Minister and apologised profusely to the policeman he may or may not have called a pleb. In a statement today – prudently, he declined offers of radio interviews – Mitchell admitted that he 'did not treat the police with the respect they deserve' when on Wednesday evening one of them refused to allow him to ride his bicycle out of the Downing Street gate and directed him instead to the pedestrian one. In the outburst that followed, he is said to have told the man that he didn’t run the government. Well, that makes two of them; neither does the Chief Whip.

In the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, there’s a picture that, last time I looked, was curtained off. A couple of Japanese girls came out from behind the curtain, stuffing their hands into their mouths to stop the giggles. I went in to see the cause of the girly mirth and there it was, Gustave Courbet’s ‘Origine du Monde’, a painting of a woman’s open legs, with dark pubic hair and a glimpse, but only a glimpse, of th e labia. It’s obviously provocative: you could say that Courbet has cut to the chase as far as male viewers are concerned. He’s got his Mount of Venus, lots of hair and a bit of bottom and, further up, there’s some uncovered breast.

Paris for lovers, tick. Paris for gastronomes, tick. Paris for the fashion-conscious, obviously. But children? Funnily enough, I find it one of the most child-friendly cities we go to. The proprietors of grand boutiques and restaurants who cold-shoulder grown-ups are all smiles when it comes to children. Propping up a bar with my two on the Rue St Honoré on a damp Sunday evening, the young man sitting next to us with his girlfriend chatted with my five-year-old daughter, treated her and the brother to an orange juice, presented her with €10 to buy a croissant and was rather hurt when I gave it back.

Today is the last day of the Government’s consultation about its gay marriage proposals. But as an editorial in the Telegraph points out, this is a more limited exercise than it sounds…you’re not being asked whether it’s a good idea for gay people to marry so much as how you think the Government should implement its proposals. Consultation, not. But since the opportunity is there, I’m all for sounding off about whether gay people should marry in the first place, as the Church of England has done, with uncharacteristic robustness, in its official response to the proposals. I can’t myself, see why marriage, as a status and a concept and a name, shouldn’t be left in its traditional incarnation, between a man and a woman.

It was pretty well apparent at the outset that the Equality Act 2010 – the so-called Socialism in a Single Clause law – spelt trouble and now it is the Catholic Church that may run foul of Harriet Harman’s pet project. The Catholic Education Service in England and Wales has written to Catholic secondary schools to get them to encourage pupils and staff to sign the online petition against the Government’s gay marriage proposals.

A few years ago, The Spectator, in an inspired notion for the Easter issue, asked a number of prominent individuals whether they believed in the Resurrection. And among the surprises was George Galloway, who replied emphatically in the affirmative: ‘Yes, I believe in the Resurrection. I believe God restored the life of Jesus of Nazareth and took him to his bosom. The example of suffering and sacrifice followed by vindication is central to my religious belief.

The Chancellor didn't even bother to hide the thick end of the wedge as he inserted the thin end into the Sunday trading laws. He declared yesterday that restrictions on Sunday trading would be lifted for the duration of the Olympics and Paralympics on the basis that ‘It would be a great shame if the country had a “closed for business” sign on it.’ And he went on to remark, ‘maybe we will learn some lessons from it’. What might those be, do you suppose? That people, left to themselves, will shop all day, every day and should therefore be able to?

No sooner does Baroness Warsi denounce militant secularists who try to marginalise Christianity than, bang on cue, up surfaces Richard Dawkins with a survey commissioned by his Foundation for Reason and Science intended to demonstrate that Christianity is a minority pursuit. His Ipsos MORI poll, published today, is intended to unpick that bit of the 2001 census which found that more than 70 per cent of respondents identify themselves as Christian.

Most Spectator readers have probably heard by now of Alain de Botton's latest, Religion for Atheists, in which he argues that the benefits of religion are too great to be confined to believers — not least because he wrote the Diary column for this week's magazine. And for those who haven't yet read about the book, let alone read it, they need look no further than Terry Eagleton's brilliant demolition of the argument in The Guardian. Mr de Botton is, he makes clear, in a very long and not entirely creditable line of those who find religion intolerable for themselves but useful for others, notably the servant classes: Matthew Arnold and Auguste Comte in particular. Indeed Mr de Botton himself acknowledges that his big idea is not new.

So Lord Falconer’s commission, funded by Sir Terry Pratchett, has concluded that there is a ‘strong case’ for assisted suicide, has it? Well, there’s a thing. Given their previous form and the composition of the committee, it would have been remarkable if they’d decided that, on balance, the law works perfectly well — which is what one of their witnesses, the Director of Public Prosecutions, Keith Starmer, said. On the whole, partly because some anti-euthanasia bodies refused to participate and partly because people with a blatant opposition to assisted dying weren’t invited to sit on it, the composition and conclusions of the body reflected the opinions of those who set it up.