Everyone did.

1. The two silly little Oz kids who thought they were clever. Through their sobs (how gutted they are!) they said, "Anyone could tell our imitations of the Queen and the Prince of Wales weren't real...surely? We weren't expecting to be put through." Yes? So then...didn't you notice, little arseholes, that neither the receptionist who first took your call, nor the nurse who gave you the details that later so shamed her she killed herself, were foreigners? Didn't you hear the accents? Didn't it cross your sorry minds that in their horribly lowly positions they might not have been able to tell the difference between your strangulated tones and their Majesties'? And that being so, that they would not have dared to say, "No Ma'am, sorry. No, Sir. It's not allowed."?

2. The Oz radio station. Oh we have procedures. We rang the hospital five times to get the nurse's permission to go on air. Leaving aside, for the moment, that the hospital says it received no such calls, the point is that since you idiots did not manage to speak to the nurse and secure her permission, you should not have gone to air. So what are these procedures of yours?

3. The hospital - exclusive, doubtless very expensive. But not prepared to pay for more than one receptionist on overnights, and no back-up even when young royals are inside? No back-up in the ward either. And is it true - somebody please tell me it isn't - that in fact Nurse Jacintha had been told she was to be summoned to a meeting in a few days' time?

4. A culture that would heap shame on a working mother for a mistake that really was not hers, a shame so profound she cannot live with it, but has to deprive her children and husband of her own self as a result.

If I were that expectant mother, I would be carrying my baby(ies) with a sort of dread. Poor lady too. They say Charlotte Bronte died of the dehydration that this sort of 'morning sickness' can cause. It's a misnomer; a category mistake...like saying, when you feel low, that you're depressed. Wait till clinical depression hits you, then you might learn the distinction.

But none of the perpetrators in this awful story understand distinction.

NS&I (the UK's National Savings and Investment) premium bonds and savings scheme is backed by the Treasury, the government's Ministry of FInance. They are running an ad. If you buy investments of some sort this financial year you might win a...Kindle. But who makes/sells Kindles? Amazon. Hang on a minute! Isn't the Treasury gunning for Amazon for non-payment of Corporation Tax?

Four days ago, just before the UN voted on admitting Palestine to non-member observer status Britain's Foreign Secretary, William Hague, explained that Britain would be abstaining unless the Palestinians agreed to return to peace negotiations without preconditions. It was an extraordinary requirement: the Palestinians (Abbas/Hamas?) may/should/almost certainly will have protested that the ending of settlement building on occupied lands ought to be a given before there could be further talks.

The day after most UN members voted Palestine that one step closer to statehood (the US, Canada, the Czech Republic and a few small Pacific states voted against), Israel announced that it was to go ahead with the building of 3000 houses in a settlement plan that had been kept in reserve for a long time. Britain and France have now called in the Israeli ambassadors to their respective countries to express restrained outage. Nobody doubts (or if they do, I can't quite understand what else they think it is) that Israel's announcement was an act of vengeful retaliation – petulance, even, that the world body should have taken Palestine one step closer to the two state solution that supposedly, in some form, Israel supports. But does it?

It makes me think of the Rambouillet Agreement of 1999, drafted by NATO, and meant to be signed by delegates of the then-Yugoslavia and Kosovo (at the time a province of Serbia), in order to end the conflict between them. Although to begin with it was the Kosovars who didn't want to sign and the Serbs who said they would, as time went on that position was reversed. Not only because the Serbs couldn’t tolerate the possibility that the agreement envisaged an independent Kosovo (which in fact later became the case), but also because NATO had tagged an appendix onto the end of the main body of the agreement which was quite extraordinary. It required Serbia to accept on its territory NATO forces, rather than UN ones, and what was more, Serbia would have to pay for them – board and lodging, as it were. Not surprisingly the Serbs refused, rejecting the agreement, which allowed NATO to declare war on them using that rejection as the pretext. Serbia lost the war; Kosovo became independent eventually; Serb resentment and sense of victimhood were duly increased.

I remember asking a man by the name of Gwyn Prins, a sort of floating consultant who at the time was barnacled to NATO, when was the last occasion that any state was required to accept conditions like those envisioned in that annex to the Rambouillet text? Cheerfully he said, "Not since Germany after it had lost the Second World War." The point was that these conditions were inserted into the annex precisely because Serbia couldn't possibly accept them.

Is this not what we're seeing now with settlement building in the occupied territories? On paper (and only on paper) Israel is prepared to accept, or has been, a two-state solution to the conflict between it and Palestine. But the placing of settlements to date has made it increasingly impossible for any form of Palestine to function. This latest building scheme is guaranteed to stymie any possible further talks. The Israelis of course will blame Palestinian intransigence for this, but it will have been part of their calculations from the start.

Apologies for the length of this post but like Mark Twain(?)I didn't have time to write a shorter one.

Salman Rushdie has written a memoir: JOSEPH ANTON (Conrad-Chekhov). Zoe Heller has reviewed it in the New York Review of Books. She's not impressed. Wow! I hope the link opens for non-subscribers to the NYR. Let me know if you can't. 

So Palestine has joined the UN with observer, rather than the full, status it wanted (and applied for in 2011). Britain abstained in the vote. The US (and Canada) and Israel voted against. The US and Israeli argument is that if Palestine can join UN agencies, as it now can – including becoming a member of the International Court – it might seek to have Israel prosecuted for war crimes, and all this would impede the progress of peace negotiations.

 What negotiations? Which peace?

In the past, no matter what treaty has been signed, or undertaking been made, by Israel, Israel has gone on and done exactly what it wanted anyway, in contravention. Later, when the Palestinians bleated that this wasn’t right or fair, the Israelis would resort to a phrase they have used since 1948: look at the facts on the ground. They have just done it again, even as they have authorised 3000 more settler homes on Palestinian land, by way of revenge, one has to suppose. You'll see if you look at this. I know it takes a bit of reading, but it matters.