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Dearest Gentle Reader,
This Author confesses that Monday has, once again, arrived with the subtlety of a seized XL bully in a drawing room. The ink is barely dry upon the morning pages before scandal, compensation, and canine carnage present themselves for inspection. One hardly knows where to cast one’s eyes first. Fortunately, this Author’s eyes are everywhere.
The most sudden of shocks arrives from The Royal Wireless Broadcasting Hall, where one Lord Mills – he of the breakfast programme, the Eurovision commentary, and a salary of somewhere between £355,000 and £359,999 per annum – has been rather abruptly relieved of his duties. The Broadcasting Society confirmed with characteristic terseness that Lord Mills “is no longer contracted,” a phrase so bloodlessly polite it could only have been composed by a committee. The reasons cited involve “personal conduct,” which in the language of institutions signifies precisely the sort of thing one is never told. On Tuesday the 24th of March he signed off saying “Back tomorrow” – and yet, Gentle Reader, tomorrow did not come. One Sir Davies appeared in his stead the very next morning, presumably having received no warning himself. If this Author were the superstitious sort, she would advise against those three little words as a professional farewell.
On a considerably less amusing subject, the Broadcasting Society’s Panorama programme has ventured inside the kennels housing more than 500 seized XL bullies across seven sites in this Kingdom. The gentleman who runs one such establishment – identified only as Mark, which this Author suspects is not his most dramatic quality – reports that attacks increase during school holidays and half-term, and that he dreads the telephone ringing with news of yet another assault. In the twelve months following the ban introduced in 2024, at least six persons have been killed in attacks involving XL bullies. The family of one young victim, nineteen-year-old Morgan Dorsett, has called for the legislation to be strengthened, with greater focus upon the owners. This Author notes – without a scrap of wit, for none is appropriate – that the matter is grave, the reform overdue, and the telephone ringing in those kennels is a sound no one should envy.
Now, to an injustice of a more financial persuasion. The Financial Conduct Authority is today expected to publish its final rules on compensation for approximately fourteen million mis-sold motor finance agreements – a scheme expected to deliver average payouts of around £700 per affected driver, totalling more than £8 billion in all. The agreements in question, struck between April 2007 and November 2024, involved commission arrangements between lenders and dealers that were, to put it delicately, not always disclosed to the buyer. Lenders face a further £3 billion in administrative costs, which one suspects they will absorb with less equanimity than their advertising budgets might suggest. A Supreme Court ruling in August limited the scope of the cases, which might otherwise have extended to tens of billions. Even so, Gentle Reader, if you purchased a motor carriage on finance at any point during those seventeen years, do keep an eye upon your correspondence.
From the realm of international intrigue: Muscovy has expelled yet another British diplomat, citing the customary accusations of espionage. The FSB alleges the gentleman provided false information to obtain entry and was detected conducting something suspiciously resembling intelligence work at informal economic gatherings – as though intelligence work at informal economic gatherings were not practically the definition of a diplomatic posting. The Foreign Office pronounced the move “complete nonsense” and accused Muscovy of an “aggressive and co-ordinated campaign of harassment.” This Author does not doubt it. Both sides have been expelling one another’s diplomats since Muscovy‘s full-scale invasion of the Ukraine in 2022, and the tit-for-tat quality of the whole affair has begun to resemble nothing so much as an exceptionally tedious game of whist played by two parties who despise each other and refuse to go home.
And finally, a dispatch from the corridors of political ambition. The Conservatives – or such of them as remain organised enough to propose anything – have called upon the government to remove VAT from household energy bills for three years, a measure they claim would save the average household £94 annually, rising to £200 with their full package of proposals. The funding mechanism involves scrapping various green energy schemes, including heat pump subsidies and the renewable energy certificates originally championed by Lord Miliband. Lady Badenoch’s party has also proposed increased North Sea drilling as a source of additional revenue. The announcement arrives amid anxiety over energy prices following the war in Persia. Whether this constitutes a bold political vision or a very loud press release, this Author leaves to her readers’ discernment – though she notes that promising to save people £94 a year while the bills rise in July is the sort of arithmetic that requires a certain confidence in public memory.
I am, as ever, your most devoted observer – Lady Whistledown.