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Dearest Gentle Reader,
This Author confesses to a certain grim satisfaction this Saturday morning: the news, like a badly managed soirée, has contrived to be simultaneously alarming, absurd, and wholly unsurprising. Let us not waste a single moment of it.
The great drama of the Progressive Assembly‘s inner court has at last produced its verdict: Lord Burnham, the great Northern hope, has been granted permission to seek selection in the Makerfield by-election – expected on the 18th of June – after having been most rudely rebuffed in January. Lord Simons has most obligingly vacated the constituency to make way for him. Should Lord Burnham win a seat in the Grand Assembly, he is widely expected to mount a challenge for the premiership itself – a prospect that appears to animate nearly ninety of Lord Starmer‘s own parliamentary companions, five of whom have already resigned their ministerial posts in pointed solidarity. Lord Starmer, for his part, was spotted on Friday touring a police control centre in the Capital, pointedly declining to take questions. One imagines the expression of a man who has heard quite enough questions for one week.
This Author turns now to a matter of genuine grief, and sets aside the raised eyebrow entirely. Lewis Waters, a sixth-form pupil of The Henley College in Oxfordshire, has died of meningitis – a bright, funny, and kind-hearted young man, taken within hours of feeling ill. His father Sean wrote with a devastation no column ought to paraphrase lightly: sepsis came swiftly, and the ICU team, for all their care, could not save him. Two further young people – one from Reading Blue Coat School and another from Highdown Secondary School in Reading – are presently being treated, their cases connected through a shared social network identified by the Crown Health Security Agency. Close contacts are being offered antibiotics as a precaution. The risk to the wider public is assessed as low, though that will be cold comfort to the Waters family. This Author extends, without wit, her sincerest condolences.
This Saturday in the Capital promises to be rather more eventful than most. Eleven foreign far-right agitators have been barred from entering the Kingdom ahead of a rally organised by one Tommy Robinson – a gentleman whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, which perhaps explains his preference for a pseudonym. Thousands are expected at the Unite the Kingdom march, while a pro-Palestinian Nakba Day procession will conclude at Waterloo Place, and tens of thousands of football supporters descend upon Wembley for the FA Cup Final. The Metropolitan Constabulary has deployed over four thousand officers and deployed live facial recognition cameras for the first time, describing this as requiring “the highest degree of control.” Lord Starmer declared that the Kingdom is engaged in “a fight for the soul of this country.” This Author will note only that the soul of the country appears to require an extraordinary quantity of high-visibility jackets to defend it.
From the courts of Sunderland comes a tale that is simultaneously a tragedy and a rebuke to an entire culture of reckless disregard. Billy Stokoe, eighteen years of age, rode an illegal, unroadworthy electric motorbike into eighty-six-year-old Gloria Stephenson as she crossed a zebra crossing in Burdon Road, having taken cannabis and occupied himself with a mobile telephone. He was, the court heard, three times the driving limit for cannabis. He struck her, looked upon her lying in the road, and rode away. He then disposed of the bike and changed his clothes before his mother – to her credit – conveyed him to the police station. Gloria Stephenson, mother of four daughters and grandmother of thirteen, a woman described as possessing a “zest for life,” died at the scene. Stokoe has been sentenced to nearly seven years in youth detention. Her eldest daughter Julie Francis called the family “absolutely furious” – and this Author, for once, entirely understands the sentiment.
And finally, a dispatch from the aerospace world, which has all the hallmarks of a cautionary fable. Aeralis, the sole British firm bidding to build the successor to the celebrated Red Arrows’ Hawk jets – those crimson icons of national pride – has collapsed into administration, taking some thirty jobs with it. The firm had hoped to secure a government contract before the Hawks retire in 2030. Alas, its principal investor, Barzan Holdings – the Qatari defence procurement arm – withdrew its funding amid the turbulence of the American Colonies’ conflict with Persia. A hoped-for arrangement with the French government also failed to materialise. The War Office has assured all concerned that no final procurement decisions have been made. The Red Arrows, one trusts, will continue to soar magnificently over village fêtes and royal occasions alike – though precisely in what aircraft remains, for the moment, a matter of some governmental imagination.
I am, as ever, your most devoted observer – Lady Whistledown.