Dearest Gentle Reader,
The March winds blow cold this Friday morning, and as we find ourselves well into the month, This Author confesses that the chill is not merely meteorological. The news arriving at one’s writing desk today is enough to make even the most stoic dowager reach for her smelling salts.
Let us begin, as one must, with money – or rather, the conspicuous absence of it. The realm’s economy, we are told, managed precisely zero growth in January. Not a decline, mind you, but not a single farthing’s worth of progress either. One might call it an achievement of perfect stagnation, rather like a society matron who has resolved to do absolutely nothing and has succeeded magnificently. Lady Reeves, our esteemed Chancellor, insists the plan is “the right one,” which is precisely what one says when one’s carriage has lost a wheel but one does not wish to alarm the passengers. Lord Starmer himself has warned that the longer the conflict in the East persists, the worse things shall become – a prediction requiring roughly the same prophetic gift as observing that rain makes one wet.
And speaking of that dreadful conflict’s ripples, Lord Miliband, our Secretary of Fuels and Flames, has declared that profiteering from oil shall “not be tolerated.” How bracing! He speaks of escaping the “fossil fuel rollercoaster” – a carnival ride, This Author notes, upon which the government has been gleefully seated for decades. His solution? Fast-tracked atomic furnaces, which historically have arrived on schedule in much the same way that Halley’s Comet arrives weekly. One does admire the optimism.
Across the Atlantic, a most delicious diplomatic morsel: His Majesty the King received a delegation of Indigenous Chiefs at the Palace and reportedly expressed “concern” over the Albertan separatist movement. Grand Chief Pete and his delegation asked the Crown to issue a Royal Proclamation affirming their ancient treaties – treaties signed, one might add, rather before the current fashion for referenda. That a Canadian province wishes to secede while its Indigenous peoples remind the King of promises made by his ancestors is the sort of irony that would make a novelist blush for being too obvious. Lord Carney, the Canadian Prime Minister, is expected at the Palace on Monday, presumably to discuss this and several other colonial entanglements.
Now for a discovery to set the heart racing – provided one’s heart is calibrated to a particular frequency of nostalgia. Two lost episodes of the Time-Travelling Chronicles, featuring the very first Doctor as portrayed by the late Sir Hartnell, have been unearthed from a cardboard box in a collector’s “ramshackle” hoard in Leicester. The episodes, unseen since 1965, feature those mechanical pepper-pots of doom, the Daleks. Sir Purves, who played the Doctor’s companion, declared his “flabber has never been so gasted” – a phrase This Author intends to borrow at the earliest opportunity. The restored treasures shall appear on the Broadcasting Society’s Magic Lantern this Easter. What joy to learn that even the most chaotic attic may yield wonders.
A committee of the Grand Assembly’s finest has pronounced itself “deeply troubled” by the uncertain future of the Broadcasting Society’s World Dispatch. The funding agreement expires at month’s end, and nobody, it seems, has thought to arrange a new one. The service, which reaches some three hundred million souls weekly, is described as “a jewel in the crown” of the Kingdom’s soft power. Sir Clifton-Brown warns it risks “withering by degrees” whilst rivals in Muscovy and the Celestial Empire spend billions on their own propaganda organs. One might observe that allowing a jewel to tarnish whilst one’s rivals polish their paste imitations is a peculiarly British form of self-sabotage.
Elsewhere, Lord Starmer has ventured to the port of Cork for a summit with the Irish Taoiseach, Lord Martin, where the two shall discuss the cost of living, energy, and security. Some £937 million in Irish investment was announced just yesterday, including energy connectors linking the Northern Province and the Principality to the Emerald Isle. This Author notes with pleasure that the relationship between these neighbouring isles is now described as “flourishing” – a word one more commonly associates with flower arrangements than with centuries of complicated history, but let us not quibble.
The wretched saga of the Royal Post Office and its cursed Horizon contraption continues to beggar belief. Lady Misra, who was jailed whilst with child for crimes she did not commit, remains without full compensation more than fifteen years on. The Committee of Commerce, led by Lord Byrne, reports that the redress schemes are “broken,” with initial offers sometimes rising from hundreds of thousands to over a million upon appeal – a discrepancy that suggests the original valuations were conducted by someone who had misplaced their spectacles and their conscience simultaneously. This Author shares Lady Misra’s sentiment entirely: accountability first, compensation second, and “nobody above the law” – though recent history suggests that motto is more aspirational than descriptive.
And finally, a tale of villainy so brazen it would be rejected from the most lurid penny dreadful. One Mr Roberts of Cardiff, a kitchen porter by trade, convinced three women he was variously employed by the Secret Intelligence Service and the Broadcasting Society, complete with a forged lanyard. He even walked one poor soul to the Broadcasting Society’s Welsh headquarters as though arriving for his shift. In truth, the only production in which he starred was an elaborate fiction costing his victims nearly fifty thousand pounds, the proceeds of which funded designer garments and narcotics. Judge Lady Hughes branded him “selfish and narcissistic” before dispatching him to gaol for five years. This Author would only add: if one is going to impersonate a spy, one ought at least to be competent enough not to get caught.
And so the day unfolds, Dear Reader – coffers empty, oil prices climbing, ancient treaties invoked, lost treasures found, and rogues unmasked. One can hardly say the season is dull.
I am, as ever, your most devoted observer – Lady Whistledown.