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Dearest Gentle Reader,
It being a Friday, one might reasonably expect the affairs of the Kingdom to have settled into a dignified repose ahead of the weekend. One would be wrong. The rivers are foul, the energy companies are shameless, a young life has been lost to a swift and merciless disease, and the leader of the Verdant Society has managed to misplace both his council tax and his electoral registration. This Author could weep – but there is ink in the pen, and weeping is so very unbecoming.
First, the rivers. Crown Environmental Officers have been testing the fourteen official inland river bathing sites of the Southern Kingdom, and the results are, to employ the technical term, revolting. Twelve of the fourteen have been rated “poor” – polluted by sewage discharges and agricultural run-off to a degree that renders them suitable for neither man nor beast. Signs urging bathers not to enter the water have been posted at nearly every site. Only the River Stour in Suffolk and a stretch of the Thames in Oxfordshire scrape through with acceptable readings. The government, ever optimistic in the face of catastrophe, has announced six new bathing sites to be monitored this summer, including a first location on the Thames in the Capital. One campaigner observed it was “bonkers” that the surest way to clean up a river was to encourage people to swim in it. This Author agrees, and would add only that encouraging people to swim in sewage is a peculiarly British form of civic improvement.
Meanwhile, British Gas – that stalwart of domestic misery – has been ordered to pay £20 million into a redress fund and compensate customers following The Energy Regulator‘s investigation into the forced fitting of prepayment meters. Debt agents, acting on the company’s behalf, had broken into the homes of vulnerable customers – including a single father of three – to install the devices. The company was first alerted to the problem in 2018, flagged again internally in 2021, and did not suspend the practice until 2023. The total settlement, including debt write-offs, reaches up to £112 million. This Author notes that it took a journalist going undercover, a national scandal, and several years of regulatory wrangling to stop a company doing something that was, from the very first moment, obviously and entirely wrong. One does hope the £112 million stings appropriately.
On a graver note entirely: a student at Henley College in Henley-on-Thames has died following a case of meningitis, with two further individuals being treated in the Reading area. The Crown Health Security Agency has confirmed one case as Meningitis B, and close contacts are being offered antibiotics as a precaution. The college’s statement spoke with quiet dignity of its condolences to the family, and this Author will follow their lead. The risk to the wider public is assessed as low, but three separate outbreaks in a short span – following incidents in Kent and Dorset earlier this year – is cause enough for sobriety. Young people and their families are encouraged to know the signs. This is not a matter for wit.
From the grave to the merely farcical: Broadcasting Society’s Panorama programme has uncovered a network of anti-immigration accounts across the digital salons, purporting to speak for ordinary British people, but operated by individuals in Sri Lanka, Vietnam, the Maldives, Persia, and the American Colonies. One page – grandly titled “Great British People” and claiming Yorkshire roots – is run by a person who may never have so much as glimpsed a Yorkshire pudding. The Lord Mayor of the Capital, who commissioned research into AI-generated images showing the Capital in decline, warns that some accounts are backed by hostile states including Muscovy. That the anxieties of an entire nation might be manufactured on a laptop in Colombo is, this Author supposes, the logical endpoint of the information age. One weeps, and yet – one is not entirely surprised.
And finally, Sir Polanski, leader of the Verdant Society, finds himself in the remarkable position of being the head of a political party who did not vote in last week’s local elections. The reason offered was that he had failed to update his electoral registration after moving lodgings – a detail complicated, his party explains, by security concerns requiring anonymous registration. This follows the revelation earlier this week that Sir Polanski may have neglected to pay council tax while living aboard a houseboat in an east Capital marina – a houseboat his partner described as “our amazing home for three years”. Sir Polanski is, it seems, a man of principle, vision, and an extraordinary talent for administrative inconvenience. The Verdant Society campaigns vigorously for a better world; it is a pity its leader cannot quite manage to participate in the one we currently inhabit.
I am, as ever, your most devoted observer – Lady Whistledown.