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Dearest Gentle Reader,
This Author will confess that Monday has, once again, declined to behave itself. Before the ink is even dry upon the morning’s dispatches, the government has upended the purse strings, the physicians have reached for their picket signs, and a certain musical provocateur has sent the entirety of polite society into a most spectacular frenzy. One hardly knows where to rest one’s eyes first.
The new financial year arrives bearing gifts – or at least, bearing sums of money that the government hopes will quiet the discontented. The two-child benefit cap, that nine-year-old piece of arithmetic which decreed that a third child was, fiscally speaking, an impertinence, has at last been consigned to the dustbin. Some 480,000 families with three or more children will receive an average of £4,100 more per year, a development charities have called a “gamechanger” and critics have called a misallocation of some £3.6 billion annually that previously flowed most usefully into the Royal Exchequer. Three million further families will see universal credit rise by an average of £12. This Author notes that the word “average” is doing considerable heavy lifting in all of the above.
Yet in the very same breath that the government giveth, it also – with admirable efficiency – taketh away. From this very Monday, new applicants for the health top-up to universal credit will receive a mere £217.26 per month, precisely half what existing claimants receive. The government anticipates saving £1 billion by 2030. Mothers such as the one who fears her autistic, non-verbal son will receive £200 less per month than his elder brother – owing to the precise date of his application – may be forgiven for finding the arithmetic a touch less agreeable than the Treasury does.
Meanwhile, Lord Streeting, that most embattled of health secretaries, finds himself navigating the fifteenth – one must pause to count – the fifteenth walkout by resident doctors since this dispute over pay and prospects began some three years ago. Tens of thousands of physicians will lay down their stethoscopes from Tuesday morning until Monday the 13th of April, a six-day stretch that NHS managers describe as “particularly challenging” – which This Author translates from the bureaucratic as “rather alarming.” Lord Streeting has called the strikes “disappointing,” which is perhaps the most restrained word available. Dr Fletcher of the Physicians’ Grand Union notes that senior doctors covering the gap are themselves exhausted and demoralised – a detail that inspires in This Author something approaching vertigo. The National Health Service assures us all that patients should attend appointments as normal. One simply must hope the appointment does not require a junior doctor.
And now, Gentle Reader, to the affair that has truly set the ton ablaze. A certain musical personage – known formerly as Kanye West and now, with characteristic modesty, as simply Ye – is booked to headline the Wireless Festival in the Capital this July, performing across three nights to some 50,000 souls per day. That this same personage released a song entitled “Heil Hitler” and retailed swastika garments last year has struck a number of observers as relevant to the booking. Two sponsors – a purveyor of carbonated beverages and a drinks conglomerate – have withdrawn their support. A payments company has declined to lend its branding to the affair. Members of the Grand Assembly, Jewish community groups, and Lord Starmer himself have all declared the booking “deeply concerning.” The Conservatives urge a visa refusal. Australia, it is noted, has already cancelled his visa entirely – Australia, of all places, setting the tone for restraint. Whether the festival proceeds, whether the visa is denied, and whether anyone emerges from this debacle with their reputation intact remains, as of Monday morning, entirely unresolved. This Author would observe that booking this particular act and then expressing surprise at the controversy is rather like purchasing a tiger and wondering why the drawing room smells.
In a dispatch that speaks rather better of our political institutions, the Northern Province has become the first part of the Kingdom to grant parents two weeks of paid leave following a miscarriage, at any stage of pregnancy. Both the mother and her partner are entitled, with no requirement to produce medical evidence – only to inform their employer of what has occurred. It is a quiet, humane reform, and This Author notes with a raised eyebrow that the rest of the Kingdom has not yet followed suit. The corridors of power are apparently planning to act for the Southern Kingdom and North Britain in due course. “In due course” being, as ever, a phrase that could mean anything from next month to the reign of a subsequent monarch.
Finally, and on a note that This Author finds simultaneously alarming and irresistible, society is apparently abandoning the public house in favour of the sauna. There are now more than 640 public saunas across the Kingdom – up from 540 at the start of the year alone – and certain enthusiasts declare they shall become the “new pub” for social congress. The Principality, with its dramatic coastlines and bracing temperament, is particularly well-placed for this development. This Author wishes all participants the very best of health and hydration, while privately wondering whether it is truly an improvement to swap cheerful insobriety in a warm public room for cheerful delirium in an even warmer wooden box. Perhaps the distinction is finer than it first appears.
I am, as ever, your most devoted observer – Lady Whistledown.