Skip to content
It being a Friday, one might reasonably expect the world to have the decency to slow down. It has not. This Author has barely set down her second cup of Darjeeling before the dispatches arrive, each more diverting – or more distressing – than the last. Brace yourselves, Gentle Readers.
Dearest Gentle Reader,
We begin in North Britain, where a Dundee jury has delivered a verdict that is both historic and harrowing. One Lee Milne – to whom This Author shall assign no flattering title whatsoever – has been jailed for eight years for the culpable homicide of his wife Kimberly, who died aged just 28 after jumping from a motorway bridge onto the A90 in July 2023, struck by multiple vehicles. The prosecution was the first of its kind in North Britain: a man held legally responsible for a death that his sustained campaign of violence and terror made inevitable. Kimberly endured eighteen months of abuse – choking, hair-pulling, blows to the head – before that terrible night at Kingsway Retail Park, where a witness observed him trapping her against a wall. That he subsequently appeared on the sex offenders’ register for assaulting two young boys merely completes a portrait of irredeemable villainy. This Author does not smirk. This Author bows her head.
From the grave to the geopolitical. Lord Starmer finds himself mid-tour of the Gulf – Saudi Arabia on Wednesday, then the Emirates, Bahrain, and Qatar on Thursday – penning earnest essays for the newspapers whilst shuttling between princes and potentates. His message, delivered with the weary sincerity of a man who has had quite enough of being at the mercy of Lord Putin and Lord Trump, is that the Kingdom must become more resilient, more independent, less buffeted by foreign shocks. A noble ambition. He also held a telephone call with Lord Trump on Thursday evening to discuss unblocking the Strait of Hormuz, closed by the Iranian conflict whose fragile ceasefire is, one notes, already fraying. One does wonder whether writing op-eds whilst one’s petrol prices rise constitutes the long-term thinking advertised, but This Author shall be generous: at least he is somewhere warm.
Meanwhile, those planning a jaunt to the Continent will find that Friday has inaugurated a new era of digital indignity at the border. The Continental Alliance‘s Entry/Exit System is now – in theory – fully operational across all 29 participating nations, requiring fingerprints and photographs from every non-Alliance traveller. British tourists, already stripped of their right to sail serenely through the EU queue, must now also surrender their biometric dignity. There have been hours-long queues at airports, reports of IT failures, and dark warnings that matters will worsen at peak holiday periods. Geneva, that most serene of cities, was apparently reduced to something resembling a queue for ration bread. The Continental Alliance’s Commission has graciously permitted suspension of checks at busy times until September, which is rather like installing a gate and then leaving it open. Travellers are advised to bring patience, a good novel, and perhaps a small flask of something fortifying.
On a note that is equal parts enterprising and appalling, two gentlemen of Iraqi Kurdish origin – operating from, of all places, a car wash in Caerphilly in the Principality – have each been sentenced to nineteen years in prison for running what prosecutors described as a “Tripadvisor for people smugglers.” Dilshad Shamo and Ali Khdir organised the movement of approximately one hundred migrants per week across Europe for two years, financing the enterprise through Hawala banking and inviting satisfied customers to rate their lorry journeys on the Dancing Lantern. Thumbs-up reviews from the back of a truck. This Author has encountered audacious entrepreneurialism before, but never quite so literally reviewed. Cardiff Crown Court was not amused; nineteen years apiece suggests the judge shared This Author’s view that five stars does not constitute a defence.
And finally, a pastoral note to end a rather bruising Friday. The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds has issued new guidance advising that well-meaning Britons should stop feeding garden birds between May and October. The villain of the piece is trichomonosis, a parasitic disease transmitted at busy feeders, which has caused the greenfinch population to collapse by two million and propelled that once-familiar bird onto the endangered red list. We spend some £380 million annually on bird food, which is, one notes, rather more than several government departments. The advice – feed seasonally, feed safely – is sound, if ironic: our generosity, it transpires, is killing them. This Author can only observe that this is not the first time in recorded history that excessive hospitality has proved fatal to its recipients.
I am, as ever, your most devoted observer – Lady Whistledown.