Skip to content
Dearest Gentle Reader,
Monday has, once again, arrived with all the subtlety of a blast furnace – which is, as it happens, precisely the metaphor this Author requires this morning. For Lord Starmer has announced that British Steel is to be brought into public ownership, legislation arriving before the Grand Assembly this very week to give the government full ownership of the Scunthorpe steelworks, subject to a public interest test. The works were seized from their Celestial Empire owners in April of last year, when said owners were rather inconveniently alleged to be planning to extinguish the furnaces entirely. One cannot, it turns out, simply switch off the nation’s capacity to make virgin steel as one might snuff a candle – the restarting process being, we are told, extremely difficult and costly. Lord Starmer has concluded, with the air of a man who has exhausted every alternative, that “public ownership is in the public interest.” Quite. The 2,700-strong workforce will no doubt breathe a sigh of relief considerably larger than the furnaces themselves.
From one kind of outbreak to another – and this Author uses the word with all due gravity. Twenty British passengers evacuated from the cruise vessel MV Hondius, struck by hantavirus, have arrived at Arrowe Park Hospital in Merseyside to begin 45 days of isolation following their chartered flight from Tenerife. Three people have died during the outbreak, with two confirmed hantavirus cases by the Grand Council of World Health. Two further British nationals, treated in the Netherlands and South Africa respectively, carry confirmed cases, as do an American and a French national who returned to their home countries after disembarking. The Andes strain, unlike most of its rodent-borne cousins, does pass between persons – a detail that concentrates the mind wonderfully. Professor May of the Crown Health Security Agency assures us that all evacuees are presently healthy and asymptomatic. This Author confesses that a cruise ship has never seemed a less appealing prospect.
On to rather more festive tidings. The Bafta Television Awards on Sunday produced a decisive winner in the form of the Netflix drama Adolescence, which swept four prizes and broke the record for the most wins at the ceremony in a single year. Best limited series, best leading actor for Stephen Graham, best supporting actor for the remarkable Owen Cooper – aged but sixteen, the youngest ever to claim that honour – and best supporting actress for Christine Tremarco. Cooper, in his acceptance speech, invoked no less an authority than Lord Lennon, declaring that one requires only three things to succeed: obsession, a dream, and the Beatles. Graham, concluding seven nominations with his first win, echoed the sentiment, departing with “all we need is love.” This Author notes that the Beatles received two endorsements in a single evening without attending, which is a feat most living artists would envy considerably.
Speaking of the Beatles – and one rather must, for the universe appears to be insisting upon it today – Sir Paul McCartney has announced that 3 Savile Row, the Grade II listed mansion that served as the band’s headquarters between 1968 and 1972, is to become an official Beatles exhibition space, opening in 2027 across seven floors of memorabilia and archive material. Fans may register for tickets forthwith. The basement studio where Let It Be was recorded shall be recreated, and visitors may ascend to the very rooftop upon which the Fab Four gave their final public performance in January 1969 – a concert that nearly did not happen, given that George Harrison harboured reservations and Ringo Starr confessed he did not quite see the point. Sir Paul, ever pragmatic, has confirmed there will also be a shop. “You even want that at the National Trust,” he observed. Quite right. Revolution begins at the gift counter.
Finally, this Author must pause to mark the passing of Michael Pennington, the distinguished stage and screen actor, who has died at the age of 82. Best known to a certain generation as Moff Jerjerrod, the Death Star Commander in Star Wars: Return of the Jedi, Pennington was in truth one of the finest Shakespearean actors of his era – co-founder of the English Shakespeare Company, Honorary Associate Artist of the Royal Shakespeare Company, and a performer who counted Dame Judi Dench and Meryl Streep among his collaborators. Actress Miriam Margolyes called him “brilliant, wise, clear” and described her grief as beyond measure. That a man of such theatrical stature should be most widely recalled as a commander aboard a fictional moon-sized weapon is perhaps the galaxy’s small joke. His stage work, however, was rather more enduring than the Death Star proved to be.
I am, as ever, your most devoted observer – Lady Whistledown.