Media scrutiny of the Princess of Wales and her personal photoshopping of her Mothering Sunday photograph has been intense. One important set of players has escaped attention, however: the picture agencies. It was they – AP, Getty Images, AFP, Reuters, Shutterstock and PA – who issued a ‘mandatory photo kill’ of the image. They doubted what PA called its ‘veracity’. I hope it is not unduly cynical to point out that these agencies hate the fact that HRH distributes her own pictures (without charge). Her homemade pics take the bread out of the agencies’ mouths. Suppose other world figures get the DIY habit: what will become of the professionals then? Are the agencies trying to teach the Princess a lesson?

Trinity College, Cambridge, houses de Laszlo’s portrait of A.J. Balfour, which was vandalised last week. One perpetrator was filmed by another for social media, while she sprayed paint on Balfour’s face and slashed the painting repeatedly. As a Trinity undergraduate, I often used to look at the portrait. It captured the slightly drooping elegance of the original, a Trinity man who was chancellor of Cambridge University and also prime minister. I imagine the ‘crime’ for which Balfour was being ‘punished’ last week was his 1917 Declaration. It said, in full:

His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.

There! The man wanted a home for the Jews. Damned out of his own mouth! What need we any further witness?

The Master of Trinity, Dame Sally Davies, says she was ‘shocked’ by the ‘act of vandalism’ against the picture. The college is helping the police to bring the assailants to justice. Good, but why was she surprised? Cambridge has recently viewed with favour so many assaults on its ‘legacy’ of slavery, often linked with the tendentious word ‘colonialism’, that it has created a feverish expectation. Jesus College wasted a six-figure sum losing a court case to take down from its chapel the beautiful bust (perhaps by Grinling Gibbons) of a great 17th-century benefactor, Tobias Rustat, because he had shares in the Royal African Company. Trinity itself commissioned a report on its slavery legacies and has spent £1 million on the matter, including a Legacies of Slavery Fellow. The Dean of Trinity, Dr Michael Banner, who watches over this stuff, has written a book to appear this summer called Reparations Now! True, Balfour himself had nothing to do with slavery, but so what? Remember that Jews are classed as white and that racism is often now defined as being ‘the idea that white people are innately superior to people of other ethnicities, especially black people’. That logic means down with Balfour and virtually any other white man whose portrait hangs in Oxbridge halls. I don’t think my dear old, rich old college exactly means to teach its students such extremism, but that is the effect. There will be more such slashings before this cultural revolution has burnt itself out. Its appeasers will not escape unsinged.

One reads rumours that Lord Cameron might want to ditch his recently acquired title to return to the House of Commons. There are better sourced suggestions that Lord Frost, a star of Eurosceptic Toryism, might resign his peerage to stand for parliament. Such a course is permitted under the House of Lords Reform Act 2014. Much as an un-lorded Frost would have to offer the Commons, and effective as we know David Cameron MP was, the change the Bill enacted is a bad idea. It is a sort of swizz and could easily be turned into a career path for MPs who lose their seats, then get made peers, then get unmade again at their convenience. Surely an important role of the House of Lords is to create political eunuchs. It is worth having a class of persons who contribute to public life in return for permanently cutting themselves off from serious political power. That value is diminished if peers can game the system.

The amazing thing about the result of the Irish referendum was that all the main political parties were blind to what was coming. The tiny Aontu, a traditionalist Catholic breakaway from Sinn Fein, was almost alone in supporting the No vote which prevailed by huge margins. To the British way of thinking, the 1937 Irish Constitution is an odd document, setting out in almost poetic language various noble aspirations which then become semi-justiciable. And yes, it does read strangely today in a post-Catholic Ireland whose ruling elites have the dreary ambition of becoming the same as all other Euro-elites. But the glaring defect of the changes proposed was that they gave nothing and took quite a lot away. One watered down the idea that marriage is what the family is founded on. The other stripped out the assertion ‘that by her life within the home, woman gives to the State a support without which the common good cannot be achieved’ and therefore ‘mothers shall not be obliged by economic necessity to engage in labour to the neglect of their duties in the home’. That article’s replacement did not mention women at all, speaking instead of ‘the provision of care, by members of a family to one another by reason of the bonds that exist among them’. It was rather as if the Church had rewritten the Hail Mary without mention of her sex, or the fruit of her womb.

Labour demands the Conservatives return the payments they received from Frank Hester. Why does it want more than £10 million to be handed over to a man it thinks is a racist?