Rishi Sunak thinks David Cameron will be a round peg in a round hole in the Foreign Office. I think (as I have written elsewhere) that he is right. If foreign secretaries could be bought at Harrods, Mr Cameron is the model discerning customers would prefer. But the underlying problem, which provoked this reshuffle, is at the Home Office. This was a personal one, because Suella Braverman, though she did not breach government policy, had defied the wishes of the Prime Minister about what her article in the Times should say. It is also, which matters much more, a national and political problem, because anti-Semitism, Islamism, immigration policy and confidence in the police are all in contention. It is on Home Office issues that public fear and anxiety centre, and on which Conservative votes, especially among the less well-off, depend. Mr Sunak is lucky that Mrs Braverman’s loopy letter of denunciation damages her cause. But his reshuffle still has a lot to do to convince.

James Cleverly, the new Home Secretary, did not want the move. He is a well-liked man, but no one would claim he has a strong grasp of difficult issues, and the issues in his new post are as difficult they have ever been. In this contested territory, people want someone who is calm but tough-minded and who has already thought deeply about these subjects. Michael Gove, Oliver Dowden, Tom Tugendhat and Kemi Badenoch are all current ministers who have done so. Mr Cleverly hasn’t. He will avoid the excitability of Suella Braverman, but at least she got excited about the right things. The Hamas-excusing marches, following hard upon the group’s atrocious massacres, send a grim message about our future as a tolerant multiracial country. I am afraid they have made me realise that the police are no longer acting without fear or favour. Millions feel the same.

A Polish friend sends me pictures of the enormous, orderly (and here unreported) Polish Independence Day march in Warsaw on 11 November, which contrast strongly with what was happening in London at the same time. Poles, he says, are ‘very confused’ by the sacking of Mrs Braverman: ‘If a country cannot honour its war dead seriously and has more flags of a foreign state which massacres Jews flying in its capital on a nationally important day, it is not a real country.’ What he says is not strictly correct: we did honour our war dead properly (and Palestine is not a state). But his point is powerful. Britain, under a Conservative government, looks weak in the face of these questions. The reshuffle does not make it look stronger.

Downing Street emphasises how keen this government is to deal firmly with the marches while protecting freedom of speech and assembly. A couple of points should come into consideration. One is that the middle of the nation’s capital is a very different place from the rest of the country. Marchers there aspire not just to be noticed but to gain control of the streets. They should not be allowed to. The streets belong to all of us and need defending by the elected government and the police. The other, related point is that marches regularly repeated are different from one-off ones. Coming to London weekly and being policed at vast public expense, they constitute aggressions.

Watch out, by the way, for BBC recidivism about Hamas. Having finally agreed to say that it is ‘proscribed by the government as a terrorist organisation’, it is starting to drop this. It is also creeping back to accepting Hamas figures. On Tuesday, the reporter Tom Bateman said the civilian death figures put out by the Hamas-controlled health ministry in Gaza ‘have always been treated as reliable’. By whom?

A side benefit of David Cameron’s return is that it makes him the first ex-prime minister since Lady Thatcher more than 30 years ago to take a peerage. All the others – except for Theresa May and Liz Truss, who remain in the Commons – have been scared off, perhaps because of the need to declare their interests, which they might find intrusive. As we were reminded by the line-up at the Cenotaph, there are an awful lot of ex-prime ministers. More of them should help in parliament.

The Speaker, Sir Lindsay Hoyle, took it upon himself to demand in the Commons how it could ask Foreign Office questions satisfactorily with a foreign secretary in the Lords. Just as easily as in the past, is the answer. A cabinet-rank minister, in this case Andrew Mitchell, answers for the department in the House. Sir Lindsay could have got the answer to his own question with about five minutes’ private consultation of the precedents. Why go public? Is this Bercow-style self-aggrandisement, or does he fear for his position under Labour?

At its AGM on Saturday, the National Trust management won all its votes on resolutions and all the council appointees it wanted, but only by dint of its ‘Quick Vote’ device which allows people to vote without studying each proposition, so long as they vote management’s way. Restore Trust candidates and motions won higher votes than last year, but not enough to defeat the skewed system. The biggest RT vote – well over 60,000 – was for the motion to end Quick Vote. It would have been easily carried, were it not for the Quick Vote system. La lotta continua, as we say in rural England.

It was the King’s 75th birthday on Tuesday, rightly celebrated. But why, oh why (to use a Daily Mail formulation) was no public recognition given to the fact that it was also the 75th birthday of his ‘twin’, Paul Dacre? The Blob, I am glad to say, has been unable to impede Paul’s career, but it still blocks him from the public service which he would love to give.