Dear Reader,
What a week it has been in this sceptred isle of ours! The Season may not yet be upon us, but scandal, spectacle, and sheer absurdity have arrived with all the punctuality of a dowager at a free luncheon. This Author scarcely knows where to begin, though begin she must, for the ink dries for no woman.
Let us commence with the affairs of state, where the ever-turbulent Grand Assembly finds itself in a perfect lather over the matter of fuel taxation. The honourable Lady Reeves, Chancellor of the Realm and keeper of the nation’s purse strings, faces mounting calls to abandon her planned rise in fuel levies come September, the excuse this time being the troubles emanating from Persia. One might think a war in distant lands would unite our politicians, but no, Dear Reader, it merely gives them fresh ammunition to hurl at one another across the chamber. The upstart Reform faction, led by the perpetually indignant Viscount Farage (for who else?), has set out with great ceremony precisely how it would cover the cost of scrapping said rise. This Author notes that Reform’s sums have historically possessed the same relationship to arithmetic that a debutante’s fan possesses to actual cooling – decorative, vigorous, and largely ineffective. Still, one must admire the theatre of it all.
Now, to darker matters, and This Author does not deploy that phrase lightly. Word has reached every drawing room in the land that a prison inmate has been charged with the murder of Lord Huntley – the Soham killer whose very name has long chilled the blood of decent society. One hardly knows what to say when a man already condemned by the court of public opinion meets so violent an end within the very walls meant to contain him. This Author shall not mourn the wretch, but she does raise an eyebrow at the state of our gaols, where it seems the King’s justice is now dispensed not by judges, but by fellow inmates with a grievance and an opportunity. The Crown’s custodial institutions, it appears, are less houses of correction and more arenas of retribution.
From one inferno of the moral variety to one of the literal sort: Glasgow’s grand Central Station, that cathedral of steam and steel, was shuttered after a monstrous fire consumed a neighbouring edifice with all the enthusiasm of a footman at a Boxing Day buffet. Yet rejoice, Dear Reader! The good people of the Northern Rail Consortium report that the station itself appears to have escaped serious harm. This Author has always maintained that Glasgow possesses a resilience unmatched south of the border. The city shall endure. The neighbouring building, alas, shall not.
And now, to the portion of today’s column that This Author has been positively itching to compose, for it concerns a gentleman – and she uses the term with the loosest possible interpretation – by the name of Lord Barton. Where does one begin with so prolific a source of scandal? Let us start with the courts. The Lady Aluko, a former lioness of the English footballing pitch, has won her libel case against Lord Barton over certain intemperate utterances he deposited upon that most ungovernable of public squares, the platform known as X. His Lordship has been ordered to pay the Lady Aluko more than three hundred thousand pounds for a mere two posts made in the year twenty-four. Three hundred thousand! One shudders to calculate what his entire catalogue of digital bile might cost him were every target to seek redress. The national debt would blush.
But wait, Dear Reader, for Lord Barton‘s week was not yet complete! Barely had the ink dried upon the libel judgement when word arrived that the very same gentleman has been charged with assault near the Huyton and Prescot Golf Club, arrested alongside a second suspect. A golf club! One might have thought that a sport requiring silence, patience, and the capacity to walk without incident across a manicured lawn would be safe from Lord Barton‘s particular brand of enthusiasm. Evidently not. This Author begins to suspect that the man could start a brawl in an empty room, and indeed appears to be testing that hypothesis with admirable scientific rigour.
On to matters of education, where the Grand Assembly‘s ministers have announced a bold new category of qualification: the V-level. These subjects, we are told, shall prepare the youth of the nation for ‘future jobs’ and end the ancient snobbery between academic and vocational pursuits. A noble aspiration indeed! This Author has long observed that society values a young man who can conjugate Latin verbs over one who can mend a roof, despite the fact that only one of those skills prevents rainwater from ruining the drawing-room carpet. Whether these V-levels shall truly transform the prospects of the nation’s young or simply add another acronym to an already bewildering alphabet soup remains to be seen. This Author, however, applauds the sentiment, even as she suspects the execution shall be as muddled as a debutante’s first quadrille.
And now, Dear Reader, to the tale that has brought more joy to This Author’s quill than any other this week. In the industrial city of Leeds, an employment tribunal has awarded more than twenty-three thousand pounds to an Irish book-keeper whose employer repeatedly shouted the word ‘potato’ at her. Potato! This Author shall pause while you read that sentence a second time, for it is indeed as absurd as it sounds. The boss in question, it seems, believed this to be an acceptable mode of address for a person of Hibernian extraction. One wonders what culinary epithet he might have deployed for a Frenchman, or whether he would have hurled ‘bratwurst’ at a German colleague with equal abandon. The tribunal, possessing rather more sense than the employer, ruled this to be racial harassment, and rightly so. Let this be a lesson to all: if one must shout vegetables at one’s staff, at least have the decency to make it relevant to the quarterly accounts.
Finally, to sport of the most inspiring variety. The gallant Sir Simpson and his noble guide, the Honourable Poth, have secured Great Britain’s first medal at the Milan-Cortina Winter Paralympics, claiming silver in the alpine combined. What courage! What grace! What a reminder that while the rest of us squabble over potatoes and fuel levies, there are those among us achieving feats of genuine brilliance upon a mountainside. This Author raises her glass to them both and trusts the nation shall do the same.
And so, Dear Reader, another week unfolds in all its glorious contradiction: murderers murdered in their cells, footballers fighting at golf clubs, bosses bellowing root vegetables, and chancellors dodging taxes of their own devising. What a time to be alive. What a time to be watching.
I am, as ever, your most devoted observer – Lady Whistledown.