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Dearest Gentle Reader,
This Author confesses to a certain weariness with Tuesdays. They arrive with such apparent innocence, positioned meekly between the wreckage of Monday and the faint promise of Wednesday, and yet they never fail to deliver calamity, scandal, and the occasional bewildering celebrity. Today has surpassed even its own low expectations.
We begin with matters of the gravest import. A former chief of that grand military alliance, Lord Robertson, has declared – in terms this Author found quite bracing over her second cup – that Britain’s national security is “in peril.” The very man who authored Lord Starmer‘s Strategic Defence Review will today accuse unspecified “non-military experts” at the Royal Exchequer of outright “vandalism.” One imagines the Exchequer clerks reading that particular epithet and spilling their ink. Lord Robertson is unambiguous: the Kingdom is underprepared, underinsured, and under attack. Defence spending sits at 2.3% of GDP whilst welfare commands a rather more generous 10.6%. Whether this is “corrosive complacency” or merely the eternal arithmetic of governing, Lord Starmer‘s people insist the largest sustained increase in defence spending since the Cold War is already under way. Lord Robertson begs to differ. Loudly. In Salisbury.
From the perils of national defence to the perils of institutional failure. The inquiry into the Southport murders – in which Bebe King, aged six, Elsie Dot Stancombe, aged seven, and Alice da Silva Aguiar, aged nine, were so cruelly taken at a dance class in June 2024 – has produced findings of a harrowing kind. The public inquiry declared the attack “predictable and preventable,” the product of a “merry-go-round” of referrals, assessments, and hand-offs between agencies that accepted responsibility for precisely nothing. Now the families’ legal representative has issued a stark warning: unless suitable disciplinary measures are taken against individuals within five agencies – including Lancashire Police, Lancashire Social Services, CAMHS, FCAMHS, and Prevent – he will name them publicly. The families are, understandably, aghast. This Author has no wit to spare on this matter, only the observation that “no agency accepted responsibility” is a sentence that ought to haunt a great many dreams.
Scarcely less troubling: the Metropolitan Constabulary now finds eleven of its officers under investigation by the police watchdog over their handling of the Wimbledon school crash of July 2023, in which eight-year-olds Nuria Sajjad and Selena Lau were killed when a Land Rover struck an end-of-term tea party on the lawn of their preparatory school. The watchdog is examining whether officers provided false and misleading information, and whether the treatment of those affected was influenced by their race. Among the more astonishing revelations: the headmistress who cradled Nuria in her final moments was never, initially, interviewed as a witness. The families seek the truth. One trusts they shall find it.
On considerably lighter terrain, the Duke of Sussex and Duchess of Sussex have descended upon Australia for a four-day tour combining charitable virtue with commercial enterprise in proportions that remain artfully undisclosed. On Tuesday they were spotted doing pottery with veterans’ children and gardening at a hospital, which is all very wholesome. The Duke of Sussex will also deliver a keynote speech at a summit where tickets cost up to £1,260 per head – a fee that suggests either extraordinary wisdom or extraordinary demand. The Duchess of Sussex, meanwhile, will hold an “in-person conversation” at a women-only gathering in Sydney. Neither the couple’s exact remuneration nor the precise allocation of Australian taxpayers’ money toward their policing has been made public. This Author finds the combination of flower arranging and keynote fees a perfectly modern form of noblesse oblige. The crowds at Melbourne’s Royal Children’s Hospital numbered in the hundreds. Progress, of a sort.
Finally, a morsel of genuine delight. A record six British acts are to be inducted into the Hall of Musical Immortals this year, among them Oasis, Iron Maiden, Sade, Joy Division and New Order (counted as one, in an act of taxonomic generosity), Phil Collins, and Billy Idol. The announcement was made, in an incongruity that would have delighted even this Author, during an episode of a popular American talent programme. Most entertaining of all: Oasis frontman Lord Gallagher, who previously dismissed the honour as unworthy of his attention, posted on Elon’s Lair on Tuesday in tones of remarkable contrition. He wished to “thank all the people who voted” and confessed that since childhood he had dreamt of the Hall of Fame. “Anything is possible if you have a dream,” he added, presumably from beneath a parka. Reader, this Author has waited years for Lord Gallagher to discover humility. It remains to be seen whether it shall survive the actual ceremony.
I am, as ever, your most devoted observer – Lady Whistledown.