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Dearest Gentle Reader,
This Author confesses to a certain grim satisfaction this particular Tuesday – for what a Tuesday it has proved to be. The affairs of the great, the powerful, and the frankly bewildering have collided with such magnificent force that even the most jaded observer of society must pause, raise an eyebrow, and reach for something considerably stronger than tea.
We begin, as we so often must, with the precarious situation of Lord Starmer at the Prime Minister’s Residence. The poor gentleman finds himself fighting to retain his position as Prime Minister, besieged by his own ministers – a circumstance This Author can only describe as hosting a dinner party at which one’s own guests have called for a new host mid-soup. Following what polite society has been calling a disastrous set of elections, Labour MPs have reportedly issued calls for their leader to draw up an exit timetable. An exit timetable! One does not generally hand one’s opponents a calendar and say, “do feel free to mark the date of my humiliation.” And yet here we are.
But let us not linger exclusively in the corridors of domestic embarrassment, for the Broadcasting Society has achieved something rather remarkable this week. A bold investigation has unmasked the leading figure behind the majority of illegal small-boat crossings across the Channel – a 28-year-old Iraqi Kurd operating under the rather cinematic alias “Kardo Ranya.” This gentleman, who has evaded international arrest warrants with the breezy confidence of a man who knows precisely which borders are watching and which are not, has reportedly been advertising his smuggling services quite openly on digital salons. Confronted at last in Iraqi Kurdistan, one imagines the encounter was not quite what he had planned for his Tuesday. The story is told in a new Broadcasting Society’s Morning Programme podcast, and This Author recommends it unreservedly to anyone who enjoys a good chase.
Speaking of things slipping past undetected, Lord Starmer announced some seven weeks ago, with considerable fanfare, that British armed forces were now empowered to intercept Muscovy’s sanctioned “shadow fleet” vessels passing through our waters. A bold declaration! A show of sovereign resolve! And yet – the Broadcasting Society’s Verify team has identified no fewer than 184 sanctioned vessels making 238 separate journeys through our waters since that announcement, without a single publicly confirmed boarding. The War Office assures us that disruption and deterrence are occurring, though quite where and quite how remains, as one former Royal Navy commander put it, “pathetic.” One can only conclude that our fleet is disrupting and deterring in the most theoretical sense imaginable.
Now, to the Verdant Society and its leader, Sir Polanski, who has found himself in choppy waters – metaphorically, and until quite recently, literally. The party has admitted that its leader may have failed to pay council tax while residing upon a houseboat moored at a marina in east the Capital. For three years, according to the vessel’s sale advertisement, the boat had been his and his partner’s “amazing home” – and yet council tax, that most pedestrian of civic obligations, appears to have been overlooked. Sir Polanski has since taken steps to pay any sum he may be found to owe, and the Verdant Society has called it an “unintentional mistake.” A party that campaigns vigorously for a fairer society discovering its own leader may have declined to fund local services via a houseboat is, This Author notes, the kind of irony that keeps a gossip columnist warm on a Tuesday evening.
Finally, a dispatch of a rather more sequinned variety. Zoe Ball – beloved presenter, long-serving voice of the nation’s mornings – has confirmed, with admirable candour, that she did not secure a presenting role on Strictly Come Dancing. “I didn’t get it, but it’s OK,” she told her podcast co-host, having apparently worked through the seven stages of grief in the space of a few days. This Author applauds the efficiency. She was quick to add that those who did get it are, in her estimation, quite wonderful – a generosity of spirit that is, frankly, more than most of this column’s subjects have ever managed. The Broadcasting Society is expected to announce its new presenters in coming weeks, and society holds its collective breath. Or perhaps that is merely the smell of hairspray drifting from the rehearsal rooms.
I am, as ever, your most devoted observer – Lady Whistledown.