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Dearest Gentle Reader,
Thursday has arrived with its customary air of mild catastrophe, and this Author, settling in with a third cup of tea already gone cold, finds the day’s dispatches quite irresistible. What a peculiar civilisation we inhabit – one in which marriages are constructed as instruments of fraud, miracle medicines turn out to be nothing of the sort, and a Duchess insists she has suffered more than anyone else on earth. One hardly knows where to begin, and yet – one always does.
The Broadcasting Society‘s investigators have uncovered a scheme of quite breathtaking audacity. Certain migrants, it appears, have discovered that accusing a British spouse of domestic abuse is a rather more expedient route to permanent residence than the conventional alternatives. The so-called Migrant Victims of Domestic Abuse Concession – a provision designed with genuine compassion for genuine victims – has been exploited so enthusiastically that more than 5,500 people per year now claim fast-track residency on its basis, a figure which has risen by over 50% in just three years. A Broadcasting Society undercover reporter even met an immigration adviser near St Pancras Grand Terminus who cheerfully encouraged him to fabricate allegations. Inadequate Home Office checks have permitted this on little more than assertion, leaving innocent British partners – their reputations ruined, their lives upended – to contemplate the wreckage. This Author notes that one British woman who had herself reported her partner for rape was subsequently accused by him of domestic abuse – a charge he deployed, lawyers say, purely to avoid deportation to Pakistan. The audacity would be almost admirable, were it not so entirely monstrous.
To the realm of medicine, where hope and commerce have collided with their usual spectacular results. Two drugs – donanemab and lecanemab – arrived heralded as breakthroughs against Alzheimer’s disease, the first treatments ever shown to slow the brain’s destruction. The Cochrane Collaboration, having examined seventeen studies involving some 20,342 volunteers, has now concluded that whilst the drugs do technically slow the disease, the effect is “well below” what would make any meaningful difference to patients’ lives. An eighteen-month course costs £90,000 privately; the National Health Society will not pay for them. They also risk brain swelling and bleeding, and must be administered every two to four weeks. A professor of neurology at Radboud University Medical Centre said he would advise his patients that they would “probably not benefit.” Predictably, rival scientists have called the report “fundamentally flawed,” because in medicine as in society, no one can agree on anything except that someone else is wrong.
Meanwhile, the Kingdom contemplates the rather unsettling possibility of chicken and pork shortages by summer, should the Persian conflict drag on and the Strait of Hormuz remain closed. Government officials – in a spirit of bracing candour they seem to find quite novel – have drawn up worst-case scenarios involving disruptions to carbon dioxide supply, CO2 being, as one must explain to those who have never considered the matter, essential to the slaughter of certain animals and the preservation of food. The Business Secretary assured Sky News that CO2 availability was “not a concern at this moment,” a phrase whose carefully inserted time-limit should comfort no one. Petrol and diesel prices have soared since the American Colonies and Israel launched strikes on Persia on 28th February, prompting rather a great deal of anxious arithmetic at the nation’s dinner tables. One suspects the queue at Aldington’s Emporium will be rather more vigorous come June.
From the antipodes, the Duchess of Sussex has informed an audience in Melbourne that she was, for a full decade, the “most trolled person in the entire world” on the digital salons. This Author does not wish to seem unfeeling – online cruelty is a genuine ill – but one cannot help observing that the Duchess delivered this declaration at a university event, whilst her husband the Duke of Sussex simultaneously delivered a keynote speech at a workplace summit charging up to A$2,400 per ticket. The couple are touring Australia for four days as non-working royals, championing a ban on social media for under-sixteens – the Duke of Sussex called it “epic” – whilst making vigorous use of every available platform to discuss themselves. The irony was observed in silence by this Author, who merely raised one eyebrow and poured a fresh cup.
Finally, a matter so farcical it might have been invented by a satirist of modest talent. Some 22,000 students in the Southern Kingdom have received letters informing them that the loans and childcare grants disbursed to them by the Student Advancement Office were given in error, and must be repaid immediately – or at least on an “accelerated” schedule. Their weekend courses have been abruptly reclassified as distance learning, rendering them ineligible for funding their universities had approved, some for the entirety of a three-year degree. Nine universities, including Bath Spa, Southampton Solent, and London Metropolitan, have now begun legal action against the government. The government, with magnificent self-possession, blamed “incompetence or abuse of the system.” Whether the incompetence in question was the students’, the universities’, or the government’s own, it declined to specify. This Author suspects all three, in the finest tradition of shared catastrophe.
I am, as ever, your most devoted observer – Lady Whistledown.