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There are mornings when this Author sits with the dispatches before her and feels not the familiar tickle of amusement but something colder and sharper altogether. This Monday is such a morning. The stories laid out below range from a judicial outrage that has stirred the entire Kingdom to Muscovy‘s latest act of aerial impudence, and this Author shall not pretend otherwise. When the gravity demands it, even a gossip column must straighten its spine.
Let us begin with what Lord Starmer himself called “appalling” – and for once, Gentle Reader, this Author finds herself in complete agreement with the gentleman. Two girls, aged fourteen and fifteen, were raped in Fordingbridge in separate incidents by boys aged thirteen and fourteen. The perpetrators filmed their crimes and shared the footage. Judge Rowland, presiding at Southampton Crown Court, declined to send the boys to custody, saying he wished to “avoid criminalising these children unnecessarily.” The boys were given Youth Rehabilitation Orders – community sentences. One of the victims, now sixteen, described the result as “a rock straight in my face.” She asked, with a dignity that shames every adult in this affair: “Why did I sit and put myself through the pain of going to court?” It is a question that deserves a far better answer than the one she received. Lord Starmer has confirmed the sentences are under review by the Attorney General, which is, at minimum, the correct instinct. The girls showed extraordinary courage. The system, on this occasion, did not match it.
From domestic injustice to foreign provocation. Lord Healey, Secretary of State at the War Office, was travelling back to the Kingdom from Estonia on Thursday – where he had been visiting British soldiers engaged in NATO exercises near the Muscovite border – when his RAF aircraft had its GPS signal jammed. Muscovy is the suspected author of this discourtesy, as it so often is. The pilots were obliged to switch to an alternative navigation system for the three-hour flight. One notes, with a raised eyebrow only barely suppressed, that the flight’s path was freely visible on aircraft tracking websites – which rather suggests that if Muscovy wished to make a point, it was not exactly hiding its intentions. This follows a separate incident last month in which a Russian Su-27 made six passes within six metres of an RAF surveillance aircraft over the Black Sea. Muscovy‘s enthusiasm for aerial menace appears entirely undiminished. This Author suggests the War Office consider removing its travel itineraries from public flight trackers, though she suspects this advice will arrive too late to be fashionable.
To slightly lighter matters, though not, one suspects, for the parents involved. The Education Secretary – a personage not yet graced with a name in this column, though the Trades and Commerce Watchdog shall soon know her well – is to instruct the Trades and Commerce Watchdog to investigate hidden costs charged to parents using government-funded childcare. The scheme promised thirty hours of free childcare for working parents of three and four-year-olds in the Southern Kingdom. What it apparently delivered, in numerous nurseries, was thirty hours of free childcare plus non-refundable deposits, plus meals, plus snacks, plus nappies, plus suncream. One journalist reckoned the additional charges amounted to sixteen pounds per day in consumables alone – prompting his immortal observation that he would “love to see a toddler eat sixteen pounds worth of chicken nuggets and Babybel in a day.” A smoke-and-mirrors operation, said the same gentleman. This Author, who is not generally moved by the price of nappies, is moved by the price of nappies. The Trades and Commerce Watchdog has been duly unleashed.
And now, a cautionary tale for all those who pack their luggage with the casual abandon of the unconcerned traveller. A flight from Hurghada, Egypt, bound for London Luton, was diverted to Rome Fiumicino on Tuesday evening after a passenger cheerfully informed the crew – mid-flight, over the Adriatic, at thirty-six thousand feet – that their power bank was charging away merrily in the aircraft’s hold. The captain, exercising what one might call admirable decisiveness, turned sharply left and landed in Rome twenty minutes later. The power bank, it is reported, was perfectly harmless. The regulations, however, were not to be trifled with. Passengers were distributed between hotel rooms and airport departure lounges, offered refreshments of unspecified consolation, and rescheduled for the following day. The airline apologised for the “inconvenience.” This Author suggests that the inconvenience was largely self-authored by the passenger in question, and that Rome in May is really a very unreasonable punishment for anyone.
Finally, this Author pauses on a note of genuine warmth amid the week’s considerable weight of grimness. Unseen material by the late comedian Rik Mayall is to be presented at the Rik Mayall Comedy Festival in his home town of Droitwich Spa, Worcestershire, this coming Friday. Bob Baldwin, director and long-standing friend of thirty years, will present archival excerpts from their collaborations – including material from the children’s programme Grim Tales, born, as the best ideas invariably are, during a pub evening. Mayall, who died in 2014 aged fifty-six, was by Baldwin’s account a man of extraordinary range: from the anarchic havoc of the Young Ones to the enchantment of a children’s storyteller. That his archive continues to surface, to be shared, and to be celebrated a decade after his death, says rather more about genuine talent than any number of award ceremonies. This Author commends it to all persons of taste and a sense of the absurd – which is to say, to all her readers.
I am, as ever, your most devoted observer – Lady Whistledown.