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Dearest Gentle Reader,
Nearly three thousand. Pause upon that number. Three thousand souls, every single day last month, receiving their medical care in the corridors, car parks, and improvised antechambers of the National Health Society‘s hospitals. Not on a ward. Not in a bed. In a corridor. One correspondent described her elderly mother as “one trolley in a sea of trolleys,” which is either a tableau of profound national shame or the most grimly compelling piece of modern art this Author has ever encountered. Another patient waited thirty-six hours in a chair, alone, before learning her blurred vision was caused by a brain tumour. Thirty-six hours in a chair. This Author has attended balls that lasted less time, and those, at least, offered refreshments.
The figures, published for the very first time, confirm what patients and nurses have known for years: that 3-4% of all National Health Society attendees via emergency departments are receiving what ministers themselves call “unsafe” and “unacceptable” care. One trusts the ministers find the label equally applicable to the years during which no one thought to count. Twenty trusts account for more than half the corridor cases. The data is new. The corridors are not.
On a more technologically brisk note, the Metropolitan Constabulary‘s formidable Commissioner, Sir Rowley, has issued a challenge to the great technology houses of our age: make stolen telephones quite useless to the thieves who purloin them. Sir Rowley has begun sharing intelligence with the fruit-emblazoned company Apple to construct a “global picture” of stolen handsets, and reports that the vast majority of devices stolen recently in the Capital were not successfully factory-reset by their new, uninvited owners. “If stolen phones cannot be reactivated, their value collapses, and so does the incentive to steal them,” Sir Rowley observed, with the brisk clarity of a man who has perhaps had his own handset snatched on the Embankment.
He has also petitioned the Home Secretary for legislation requiring telephone companies to publish data on stolen devices. This Author notes with some delight that a police force and a technology giant have formed a more productive alliance in six months than the Grand Assembly has managed on the same subject in several years. One is grateful for small mercies, even digital ones.
And now, to commerce – and to a man who apparently views the words “unsolicited” and “unwelcome” as mere suggestions. Lord Ashley of Frasers, once the presiding genius of Sports Direct and now the proprietor of an empire ranging from House of Fraser to Jack Wills, has made an offer of €1.98 billion – £1.73 billion in the Kingdom’s own coinage – for the remaining share of the German fashion house Hugo Boss, in which he already holds a shade over a quarter. Hugo Boss responded that the offer was “unsolicited” and had “not been coordinated with the company,” which is rather like noting that a thunderstorm had not coordinated with one’s picnic. Frasers expects the acquisition complete by year’s end. Hugo Boss says it will “thoroughly examine” the proposition. This Author imagines the boardroom in Stuttgart doing so with the expression of a man examining a letter from a particularly persistent suitor.
From the world of political intrigue: Lady Rayner, former Deputy Prime Minister and perennial voice of progressive conscience, has once more broken ranks with her own government’s immigration policy – specifically its proposal to extend the settlement waiting period for migrant care workers already residing in the Kingdom from five years to ten (or, in earlier consultations, as many as fifteen). She called such retrospective alteration “un-British,” a charge that carries considerable weight from a woman who spent years in the highest offices of the Progressive Assembly. The government’s spokesperson replied that “the privilege of living here forever should be earned, not automatic,” which is the sort of sentence that reads quite differently depending on whether one has ever needed to earn it. Meanwhile, Lord Burnham of Greater Manchester offered his sympathetic agreement from the wings. A chorus, then, if not yet a revolt.
Finally, a story that will cause consternation in pet-owning households across the Kingdom. A panel of vets, giving evidence to an Upper Chamber committee, has called for a ban on over-the-counter flea treatments – specifically those containing fipronil and imidacloprid – on the grounds that they are rather toxic to wildlife. Eighty per cent of the Veterinary Guild‘s twenty thousand members, it emerges, support restricting their sale to vets only. Most deliciously: when asked whether they treat their own animals with these products, the majority of vets confessed they do not. One is left to reflect that the profession has, for some years, been recommending to the public a monthly prophylactic treatment that it does not apply to its own cats. This Author’s opinion of monthly flea treatments – and indeed of unsolicited advice dispensed with great authority – has never been higher.
I am, as ever, your most devoted observer – Lady Whistledown.