For Peter Hitchens in the Mail on Sunday the decay of the traditional family is behind the case of Melissa Smith, the 14-year-old girl who had an abortion without her parents' knowledge.

Such decay has been allowed "because the married family gets in the way of two mighty forces in our society. One is the 'parental state', which believes it is so good that it wants to be all-powerful. The other is the greed of business, which doesn't want mothers staying home running happy households when they could be hunched in offices or factories."

The problem, for the Sunday Times's Minette Marrin, too, lay with the state. "I don't really suppose that there has been any well-articulated conspiracy in this country to undermine families ... But quasi-socialist policies have served those purposes well since the war, in particular the attempted nationalisation of the family by the welfare state. Today it is not ideals of welfare, specifically, but ideals of human rights that threaten the family, and swell the power of the state."

Maxine Carr, who was released from jail on Friday, is portrayed as "an incarnation of evil to be ranked alongside willing participants in multiple murder such as Myra Hindley," said Jenny McCartney in the Sunday Telegraph, even though when Ian Huntley murdered Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman, "an oblivious Ms Carr was 100 miles away in Grimsby". McCartney reckoned there was a reason for the hatred: "It is - and will remain - Ms Carr's particular bad luck to have come to public attention at roughly the same time as Myra Hindley died: there was a gaping, Hindley-shaped hole ... and [the tabloids] have simply used her to plug it."

In the wake of the Duke of Devonshire's funeral, Mary Riddell reflected in the Observer on wealth. "Though often selfish and sometimes unhinged, the rich have seldom seemed as dislikeable as now," when, for example, the co-founder of Microsoft, Paul Allen, has a yacht with "a deck the size of Old Trafford, a submarine in the hold and a fuel tank that takes $250,000 to fill". Faced with such ostentation, Riddell reflected, perhaps the old-style aristocrat, "custodian of art and purveyor of damson jam online, looks suddenly less alarming than new potentates".