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Dearest Gentle Reader,
Sub-letting. That most unglamorous of domestic arrangements, the province of landlords in dusty overcoats and students of insufficient means, has this Friday ascended to the very heights of royal discourse. The Crown’s Spending Watchdog has revealed, with the deadpan solemnity of an accountant at a funeral, that Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor has been quietly collecting an undisclosed rental income by sub-letting three cottages on the Royal Lodge estate, a property he leases from the Crown Estate at no monthly cost whatsoever – having paid £7.5 million for repairs in lieu of rent. One pays with renovations; one earns from the outbuildings. A most creative accounting, this Author concedes.
The same report, the first of its kind in twenty years, informs us that His Majesty the King pays, from his private purse, the rent on palace apartments for Andrew’s daughters – Princesses Eugenie and Beatrice – who are not working royals. Eugenie resides at Kensington Palace; Beatrice at St James’s Palace. Both palaces are maintained by public funds. A Palace source assures us this costs the taxpayer nothing extra. Former minister Norman Baker calls it “outrageous” and declares that “deference is wearing thin indeed.” This Author, who wears her deference like a well-cut pelisse, neither confirms nor denies – but notes that twelve properties between one family and their staff is, by any reckoning, a rather generous estate.
From the domestic to the miraculous: researchers at the University of Cambridge have announced a vaccine whose key component was designed entirely by artificial intelligence – the first such trial ever conducted in human beings. The AI has, it seems, done what generations of overworked scientists could not: stepped outside the present moment and engineered a “super-antigen” capable of protecting against the entire family of coronaviruses, including future variants not yet invented by nature, and potentially against flu and Ebola besides. This Author, who has sat through three separate seasons of panicked reformulations, finds this news so welcome she is almost prepared to forgive the machine its other habits. Almost. The work is still early, the scientists caution. But as Professor Heeney puts it, they mean to get “so far ahead of the curve” that the next pandemic finds us ready. A refreshing change from the usual approach, which is to find us profoundly unprepared and blaming someone else.
No account of this Friday would be complete without mention of a most alarming occurrence at the University of Surrey in Guildford, where a former student, Almunthir Daqamah, aged twenty-one, has been charged with attempted murder after a campus safety officer was shot with a crossbow at the Manor Park Student Village. The officer, a gentleman of his fifties, remains in a stable condition in hospital, and the wider campus community is – understandably – shaken to its foundations. “You don’t really expect to see this on a university campus,” said one student midwife, which is, perhaps, the most eloquent understatement this Author has encountered in some time. The Surrey Constabulary confirms there is nothing to suggest a terror connection and that no other persons are sought. The institution has praised its campus safety team for responding with, as the University put it, “professionalism and courage.” This Author would agree – and trusts the injured officer makes a full and swift recovery.
Turning, with some relief, from crossbows to chalk-and-slate: more than twenty thousand persons have signed a petition demanding a review of this week’s A-level mathematics examination set by Pearson Edexcel. Students describe the paper as requiring “multiple layers of reasoning” and “extended algebraic manipulation” – language that, to this Author’s ear, sounds rather like a description of getting out of bed on a cold morning. One student wrote that her university offer was “slipping away” as she completed the paper. A parent declared that Edexcel had, if nothing else, succeeded magnificently in “creating a sense of underachievement.” The examination regulator is now “closely monitoring” the marking. This Author, who sat through examinations of a different era, offers the young scholars this sole consolation: nobody in a drawing room has ever been asked to factorise anything.
Finally, to ambitions of an altogether grander variety. Lord Burnham, currently the Mayor of Greater Manchester, has confirmed, with admirable candour at a Broadcasting Society Question Time special in Makerfield, that should he win the constituency’s forthcoming by-election on the eighteenth of June, he would seek to enter any Labour leadership contest. Lord Streeting, he noted, appears already to have launched one. The by-election itself was contrived with singular convenience: the sitting MP, Lord Simons, stepped down expressly to allow Lord Burnham to stand, which is either touching democratic self-sacrifice or the most elaborate political stage-dressing this Author has observed since the last reshuffle. Lord Starmer, asked at the Prime Minister’s Residence about his own position, was assured by a spokesman that he “will not walk away from the mandate he was given just two years ago.” A number Ten speaks; the corridors of power echo; and Lord Burnham, plumber-rival at his elbow, awaits his moment. One does so enjoy a patient schemer.
I am, as ever, your most devoted observer – Lady Whistledown.