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Dearest Gentle Reader,
Sunday, as ever, arrives with the air of a guest who has outstayed the week and yet refuses to leave quietly. Today it brings heat, humiliation, and at least one judge whose reasoning This Author suspects was composed at the precise moment the mercury exceeded thirty degrees. The month draws near its close, and it does so, it must be said, in a most dramatic fashion.
Let us speak plainly of a matter that demands plain speech, though it pains This Author to abandon her customary archness. A girl of fifteen was raped by two boys in an underpass by the River Avon in Fordingbridge. She endured a trial, relived every degradation before a court, and waited for justice. The judge, one Nicholas Rowland – presiding at Southampton Crown Court – then declined to send the boys to gaol, declaring he did not wish to “criminalise” them. He praised their conduct during the trial. He praised them. The victim, now sixteen, told the Broadcasting Society it felt like a “rock straight in my face”. The attorney general is, at least, to review the sentence. One can only pray that review arrives with rather more urgency than the original justice did.
From the courtroom to the coast, where the weather has apparently decided that if the nation must suffer, it shall at least suffer in sunshine. A temperature of 30.5 degrees was recorded at Frittenden in Kent on Saturday – the highest of the year, and the earliest the Kingdom has seen thirty degrees since 1952. Amber heat-health alerts are in force across the Midlands and eastern Southern Kingdom, and forecasters suggest bank holiday Monday may shatter the all-time May record of 32.8 degrees, set in 1944. Amber alerts. Record temperatures. A bank holiday. The Southern Kingdom is, in short, doing precisely what it does best: being entirely unprepared for the season it actively invited.
And what of those intrepid souls who elected to escape said heat via the Channel Passage? They arrived at Dover on Saturday to discover that French border officials, in a spirit of magnificent inconvenience, had introduced supplementary checks under the Continental Alliance‘s new Entry/Exit System – a system whose actual biometric machines have not yet been switched on, yet whose paperwork requirements proved quite sufficient to generate queues of up to two and a half hours in thirty-degree heat. Over 8,000 cars were expected at the port. The French eventually suspended the additional checks, traffic began to flow, and then – one can only admire the commitment – the checks were reinstated again shortly before five o’clock. A test for the new border system, the port called it. This Author would call it a masterclass in collective suffering.
Viscount Farage, never a gentleman to let a Sunday pass without an announcement, has declared that income tax on overtime above forty hours per week should be abolished for workers earning under £75,000. He has named this the “hard work bonus”, at a projected cost of £5 billion annually, to be funded by cuts to welfare – including, the Reform Society has previously suggested, ending payments to those with anxiety disorders. The Progressive Assembly, the Tories, and the Liberal Democrat Society have all questioned whether the arithmetic holds. This Author notes that proposing to relieve the anxious of their benefits in order to reward the industrious is a curious definition of a “hard work bonus” – though she supposes consistency was never the Reform Society‘s most celebrated virtue.
Finally, for those who prefer their spies fictional and their scandals contained within a video game, comes news that a new 007 has emerged – not upon the silver screen, but in a game entitled 007 First Light. Irish actor Patrick Gibson portrays a younger, more vulnerable Bond, before the licence to kill, before the suavity, before, one presumes, the inexhaustible supply of evening wear. The casting process for the next cinematic Bond has, we are told, only just officially begun – some fifteen months after the American picture-house consortium assumed control of the franchise. Meanwhile, the Danish studio behind the game describes the pressure of “carrying such a massive IP forward” with admirable seriousness. This Author has every sympathy. Carrying anything forward in this heat is a considerable achievement.
I am, as ever, your most devoted observer – Lady Whistledown.