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Dearest Gentle Reader,
This Author confesses to having held her quill aloft for a full minute this Tuesday morning, quite unable to decide where to begin – for the world has outdone itself in the sheer variety of its absurdities. Monarchs addressing foreign assemblies, landlords weeping into unpaid ledgers, oil men counting their windfalls from the misery of conflict, and the Grand Assembly squabbling over whether children may continue to rot their minds at will. It is, as Tuesdays go, rather full.
His Majesty the King and Queen Camilla are presently gracing the American Colonies with their presence, in what is the first royal state visit since the late Queen Elizabeth’s in 2007. This Author notes, with the driest of observations, that His Majesty is expected to address the colonial legislature with a twenty-minute speech urging tolerance, liberty, equality, and the great transatlantic friendship – all at a moment when Lord Trump has been repeatedly lambasting Lord Starmer over the Persian war. The King will speak of reconciliation and renewal. Lord Trump will, presumably, speak of himself. Security in Washington is, we are told, extremely tight – which is perhaps the least surprising sentence This Author has ever committed to paper. One hopes His Majesty’s famous equanimity holds firm through the whole exquisite diplomatic ordeal.
Closer to home, and considerably less ceremonious, is the plight of one Rongmala, an accidental landlord of south the Capital who finds herself owed some £15,000 in unpaid rent by a tenant who has declined, with admirable stubbornness, to either pay or depart. A judge has issued a court order. The bailiffs, however, are booked until approximately the reign of the next monarch. Rongmala’s son describes the situation as heartbreaking. This Author describes it as a masterclass in the particular cruelty of bureaucratic delay. The government’s new Renters’ Rights Act – banning no-fault evictions and limiting rent increases – arrives on 1st May, and landlord groups warn the already clogged courts shall become wholly impassable. Meanwhile, renters at a protest in the Capital this month report their own considerable miseries. It seems everyone in this saga is trapped – which, upon reflection, is precisely what happens when a system is designed by nobody in particular and maintained by nobody at all.
This Author must set aside wit for a moment, for the figures released this Tuesday are not ones that invite levity. Some 150 people are suspected to have taken their own lives in the year to March 2025 following domestic abuse – a rise from 98 in the previous twelve months. The National Police Chiefs’ Council attributes part of this increase to improved reporting practices, which is simultaneously a cause for cautious relief and for profound alarm. Women comprised 73% of those suicides. The report also records 80 intimate partner homicides and 347 deaths linked to domestic abuse in a single year, and a total of 1,452 such deaths over five years. The youngest victims were under 18. This Author shall not dress this in finery. Society ought to look at these numbers plainly, without adornment, and ask itself what it intends to do about them.
On the subject of children and their welfare – though in a considerably more farcical register – the Grand Assembly continues its magnificent standoff over whether the young shall be restricted from the digital salons. The Upper Chamber has voted four times for an Australia-style ban on under-16s; the government has responded with amendments, counter-amendments, consultations, and the solemn promise that it absolutely, definitely, positively will do something once the consultation ends on 26th May – though it will not say what. MPs supported the government’s latest manoeuvre by 272 votes to 64. The bill now returns to the Upper Chamber for what is optimistically described as its final consideration. This Author observes that the only people moving more slowly than the legislators are, presumably, the teenagers in question, who remain entirely undisturbed and scrolling throughout.
Finally, for those who prefer their scandal in the form of rather staggering numbers, the oil concern known as BP has reported profits of $3.2 billion for the first three months of this year – more than double the $1.38 billion of the same period last year. One thanks the Persian war and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, which carries approximately 20% of the world’s oil and liquid natural gas, for this happy circumstance – if happy is the word one chooses, which it emphatically is not. The price of Brent crude has swung from $73 a barrel before the conflict to nearly $120 at its peak, settling now at around $110. The company’s new chief executive has noted, with magnificent understatement, that the industry is operating in an “environment of conflict and complexity.” Quite so. As the month draws near its close, This Author notes that some are counting the cost of war, and some are counting rather more agreeable things altogether.
I am, as ever, your most devoted observer – Lady Whistledown.