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Dearest Gentle Reader,
This Author confesses that a Thursday in April ought to inspire a certain brisk optimism – the weekend visible on the horizon, the blossom on the trees. And yet. Today’s dispatches arrive like a succession of cold showers, each one more startling than the last. One barely has time to compose oneself before the next arrives. Onwards, then, with eyes wide open.
The most wretched affair to land upon this Author’s desk concerns one Robert Bush, a funeral director of Hull – a man entrusted with society’s most solemn obligations, and who treated them, it appears, as something of an inconvenience. Mr Bush has pleaded guilty at the Hull Crown Court to thirty counts of preventing lawful and decent burials, having left the bodies of thirty individuals – including, most grievously, four infants lost in pregnancy – in conditions quite beneath any civilised standard. He previously admitted presenting bereaved families with the ashes of complete strangers, selling fraudulent funeral plans to over 150 souls, and – one almost cannot write it without a shudder – stealing charitable donations made by mourners at their most vulnerable. Some 240 victim impact statements await the sentencing hearing in July. The judge has declared a custodial sentence inevitable. This Author ventures that “inevitable” rather undersells the public appetite for justice.
Turning to the corridors of power, Lord Starmer finds himself hosting a virtual summit of some thirty nations today, all gathered to wring their hands – diplomatically speaking – over the Strait of Hormuz, that critical shipping passage which Persia has been rather enthusiastically blockading. Lady Cooper is to chair proceedings. Notably absent from the guest list: the American Colonies, whose leader Lord Trump has instead offered the bracing counsel that other nations should simply “go to the Strait and just take it” – advice of the sort one might receive from a particularly unhelpful uncle at Christmas. Global fuel prices soar, allies dither, and Lord Starmer explores “each and every diplomatic avenue available.” One trusts the avenues are rather better maintained than the Strait itself.
Closer to home, the government’s quarrel with the Physicians’ Grand Union has curdled most disagreeably. Lord Starmer issued a 48-hour ultimatum on Monday: call off next week’s six-day strike, or lose the promised 1,000 new doctor training posts. The Physicians’ Grand Union declined to blink. The posts have duly been withdrawn. The strike will proceed. One notes with weary amusement that both sides have accused the other of moving the goalposts – a sporting metaphor that feels entirely inappropriate when the pitch in question is the nation’s health. The resident doctors call it disheartening; the government calls their offer generous. This Author calls it an argument conducted at full volume in a hospital corridor, which helps precisely nobody.
On a considerably more uplifting note, This Author’s eye was caught by one Clarke Reynolds of Havant – known charmingly as “Mr Dot” – who shall be running the Brighton Marathon later this month guided not by a companion at his elbow, but by a worldwide network of virtual volunteers speaking to him through smart glasses in real time. Mr Reynolds, who has been blind for thirteen years and whose current vision resembles, by his own account, being perpetually underwater, previously completed the Capital’s great marathon with a physical guide. Now he upgrades to the entire sighted world as his co-pilot. A global village guiding one determined man through 26.2 miles, past the bins and the parked carriages. If that does not restore one’s faith in human nature after the morning’s earlier dispatches, nothing shall.
Finally, the tale of one Christopher Joell-Deshields, lately chief executive of Pride in London, who has been rather spectacularly dismissed. The charge: spending £7,000 in sponsor-donated vouchers – intended as raffle prizes and gifts for volunteers – on luxury perfumes and Apple products. He was suspended last September, collected his full annual salary of £87,500 throughout seven months of suspension, and has now been sacked following an independent investigation. His appeal was rejected. This Author does not wish to be uncharitable, but one suspects the volunteers, who number some one thousand souls and work without pay, may have had opinions about the perfume. The celebration itself is expected to proceed on the 4th of July, which this Author considers an admirably defiant date. Governance, however, shall henceforth be restructured. One hopes the replacement’s expense receipts are rather more transparent.
I am, as ever, your most devoted observer – Lady Whistledown.