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Dearest Gentle Reader,
Justice, it has been observed by wiser minds than This Author’s, is only as strong as those appointed to uphold it. This Monday, we are reminded – with some force – of what becomes of a society when those guardians look away, cover their ledgers, and trust that the bereaved will eventually tire of asking questions. They do not tire. They never do.
The public inquiry into the Nottingham attacks of June 2023 has concluded, and the verdict of the bereaved is not one that the National Health Society nor the constabulary may wave away with an apologetic press release. Valdo Calocane, diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia in 2020, murdered Barnaby Webber, Grace O’Malley-Kumar, and Ian Coates, and attempted to kill three others. Fourteen weeks of public scrutiny later, the inquiry has laid bare what Emma Webber, Barnaby’s mother, described with devastating precision as “cover-up over candour” and “a catastrophic collapse of responsibility.” She stood before the assembled press this Monday and declared it an “undoubted miscarriage of justice.” This Author has attended many a dramatic pronouncement in the salons of the Capital, but none so quietly devastating as a mother’s composed fury on behalf of her murdered son.
Calocane currently resides in a hospital under an indefinite order, having pleaded guilty to manslaughter on grounds of diminished responsibility. The families have never been satisfied with this outcome. Having now heard fourteen weeks of evidence detailing precisely how many agencies failed to prevent the preventable, one struggles to find fault with their position.
Now, Gentle Reader, permit This Author a moment to address a matter which arrived via the Broadcasting Society’s Welsh headquarters and which can only be described as a dispatch from the outer reaches of human ingenuity. It appears that certain gentlemen of the Kingdom, unsatisfied with conventional employment, have taken to the digital salons to advertise their biological services to women desperate to conceive. One such prolific fellow – named publicly by a family court judge in Cardiff as Robert Albon – claims fatherhood of some 180 children across the globe. One hundred and eighty. This Author required a second cup of tea upon reading that figure.
The Broadcasting Society’s Welsh headquarters procured a sample from this gentleman for one hundred pounds in cash, posted in an envelope, chilled by a frozen carton of tomato passata. A licensed clinic examined it four hours later and confirmed every last cell was deceased. The passata, presumably, had more vitality. The Kingdom’s fertility regulator warns of “exploitation by predatory donors,” which is rather putting it mildly when one considers that some digital salon groups boast forty thousand members seeking exactly such arrangements. This Author wishes it noted, for the historical record, that the Regency era had its share of scoundrels – but none, to her knowledge, dispatched them next-day by Royal Post.
On a matter of equally urgent social concern, though rather less pungent, the government has announced that ministers shall, for the very first time, issue formal guidance on children’s screen time for those aged five to sixteen. A three-week consultation has been launched, with guidance to follow in the autumn. This Author applauds the ambition, whilst quietly noting that the children in question have been glued to their devices for approximately fifteen years awaiting this intervention. The Department for Learning informs us the guidance will address how much screen time is advisable, when a child ought to receive their first smart telephone, and how technology functions in schools. Teenagers, apparently, have been requesting that adults intervene. That, Gentle Reader, may be the most extraordinary sentence This Author has written in a considerable while. When the young are begging for parental authority, something has gone quite spectacularly sideways.
From the south coast, meanwhile, a story of institutional failure of a rather different stripe. Thousands of civil servants’ widows and dependants find themselves unable to access pension payments owed to them, following a calamitous transition to the outsourcing firm Capita, which assumed administration of the civil service pension scheme in December last. One widow, Kay Donald of Glasgow, has not received a single payment in the nine months since her husband Barry died suddenly – found by his wife behind their front door, a week before their thirty-fourth wedding anniversary. She has phoned. She has emailed. She has written letters of complaint, engaged her solicitor, and alerted her Member of the Scottish Assembly. Capita has apologised for the “worry and frustration.” This Author suspects Mrs Donald would describe her situation in rather stronger terms. The scheme covers approximately 1.7 million members. One trusts Capita is aware that patience, unlike the passata above, does eventually expire.
Finally, a report from Cardiff University that This Author commends without irony or embellishment, for it involves thirty young women rugby players, specially designed mouthguards, and a long overdue correction to one of sport’s more glaring oversights. Ffion Jones, twenty-two, has been playing rugby since the age of eight in Ammanford, Carmarthenshire, and is one of thirty women participating in the first study of its kind to examine the effects of repeated head impacts specifically on female athletes. Previous protocols, she notes with admirable composure, were largely based on data from men and “slightly adapted” for women. One might, she implies, have tried slightly harder. The study tracked participants across a full season, measuring the number and force of head impacts, with MRI scans for some. Miss Jones reports that the research has changed how she thinks about her health. This Author thinks about her head rather more carefully after reading it, and she has not played rugby once.
I am, as ever, your most devoted observer – Lady Whistledown.