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Dearest Gentle Reader,
It being a Sunday, one might reasonably expect the great and the terrible to observe a day of rest. One would, as ever, be entirely wrong. This Author has barely set down her third cup of thoroughly cold tea before the dispatches arrive in such profusion as to make the head spin and the pen fly. Let us waste not a moment.
Word reaches this column that Lord Starmer‘s tenure at the Prime Minister’s Residence is facing its first formal tremor – and from within his own household, no less. A former minister, one Catherine West, has declared herself a candidate for the leadership of the governing party, announcing to the Broadcasting Society’s Morning Programme that she currently commands precisely ten supporters. Ten. Out of the eighty-one required. One admires the audacity, if not the arithmetic. Colleagues have variously described her intervention as “bonkers,” a “howl of pain,” and – most succinctly – “Crikey.” The Prime Minister’s Residence is, naturally, ignoring the whole affair with the serene confidence of a man who knows the numbers. Though, Gentle Reader, ten was also once a sufficient number to begin a rather notorious revolution. This Author merely observes.
Meanwhile, in news that makes this Author’s dispatches feel faintly pedestrian, the War Office has confirmed that British Army paratroopers have literally leapt from the skies onto Tristan da Cunha – widely regarded as the most remote inhabited island on this earth – to attend to a British national with suspected hantavirus. The gentleman in question disembarked from the stricken cruise vessel MV Hondius in mid-April and began displaying symptoms a fortnight later. Oxygen, too, was dropped by an RAF aircraft, supplies having reached a critical level. Six cases of the virus have now been confirmed across the MV Hondius outbreak, with three deaths recorded in total. This is, the War Office notes with some pride, the first time the Kingdom’s military has parachuted medical personnel in for humanitarian purposes. This Author raises a respectful glass – one does not, as a rule, applaud the dropping of people from great heights, but on this occasion she shall make an exception.
As for the remaining twenty-two Britons aboard the MV Hondius, they are to be brought home and housed at Arrowe Park Hospital in Wirral – the very establishment that served as the Kingdom’s quarantine site during the great Covid unpleasantness of 2020. There is something almost comforting in the institution’s grim familiarity with the role. They shall be tested before disembarking, and those found well will proceed directly to a repatriation flight. This Author wishes them every speed and good health.
To the Principality now, where Plaid Cymru has achieved what many considered unthinkable – displacing Labour as the largest party in the Welsh parliament, claiming forty-three seats in the new ninety-six-member chamber. Leader Rhun ap Iorwerth, flushed with triumph, has vowed to govern alone despite being six seats shy of a majority. He intends to be confirmed as First Minister as early as Tuesday, aided considerably by Labour’s diminished band of nine, who are expected to abstain with the dignified silence of those who know precisely how badly the evening has gone. As political dramas go, it has all the ingredients this Author adores: a stunning upset, a bold solo gambit, and a presiding officer’s vacancy to be filled by secret ballot before any of it can proceed. The Principality does not do things by halves.
On a matter that admits of no wit whatsoever, this Author must report with the gravity it deserves: religious leaders from Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Sikh, and Zoroastrian communities have joined together in an open letter declaring antisemitism “a problem for all of us to fix.” The letter, signed also by figures from business, sport, and the press, described recent violence against the Kingdom’s Jewish community as a “nightmare from another time” – and so it is. Two Jewish people were killed outside a Manchester synagogue in October last year; four ambulances belonging to the Jewish charity Hatzola were set ablaze in Golders Green earlier this year; and further attacks have followed with wearying frequency. Sir Ephraim Mirvis, Chief Rabbi, called the letter a “powerful riposte” to those responsible. This Author agrees entirely. Some dispatches require no embellishment.
And yet, in the same breath, the Metropolitan Constabulary confirms that two young men – aged twenty and twenty-one – have pleaded guilty to filming themselves verbally abusing a Jewish man in Clapton Common on the Dancing Lantern, travelling there with the express purpose of spreading hatred to the widest possible audience. They were apprehended before they could flee. They will be sentenced on the fifth of June. The Metropolitan Constabulary reports that some fifty persons have been arrested for antisemitic hate crimes in the past four weeks alone. That the open letter above was necessary at all is the scandal; that it was written with such warmth and solidarity is, perhaps, the only comfort this grey Sunday morning affords.
I am, as ever, your most devoted observer – Lady Whistledown.