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Fourteen. That is the age of the girl charged this Friday with three counts of attempted murder following a knife attack at a school in the Blackley district of Manchester. Fourteen years old, and counter-terror officers are now the ones leading the investigation. This Author does not pretend to find the comedy in that sentence, for there is none to be found. Two pupils of the same tender age and a member of staff, all of seven-and-twenty, were stabbed at the Blackley Academy of Learning on Tuesday morning. All three have since been released from hospital without serious injury, which is, at minimum, the sole mercy this tale affords. The suspect had been briefly held under the provisions of the Mental Health Acts before being remanded to police custody, and is expected to appear before the magistrates of the Capital’s Petty Sessions this very day.
And yet, if one tragedy does not suffice to darken a Friday, the Kingdom has been reminded this morning of a wound considerably older and considerably less healed than one might wish. Baroness Casey, she who authored the landmark inquiry into grooming gangs, has declared in no uncertain terms that the government has taken the “lazy option” in its response to the criminalisation of victims. Children who were groomed, violated, and then – in a feat of administrative perversity that beggars all belief – prosecuted for the very crimes that were committed against them, have been waiting decades for justice. The government introduced legislation to pardon so-called “child prostitution” offences, which Baroness Casey was kind enough to call the easy route before adding, rather less kindly, that it does not go nearly far enough. A comprehensive disregard scheme, she insists, is required. The Office of Home Affairs has directed those affected to contact the Criminal Cases Review Commission. Those affected, meanwhile, continue to carry criminal records for crimes that were done to them. The word “failed” appears in this morning’s dispatches. It appears, one suspects, with some regularity.
To lighter, though scarcely less urgent, matters. A million young people across the Kingdom are to be offered a vaccine against meningitis B, following the largest and fastest-growing outbreak of that dreadful disease on record, centred upon Kent, with further alarming clusters in Weymouth and Reading. The scheme targets those in their final years of schooling and those newly venturing to university – a population, officials note, at heightened risk owing to their enthusiastic habits of kissing, sharing vessels, and dwelling in close proximity to one another. This Author cannot say this comes as a surprise. The programme was prompted in no small part by the death of young Aaron Mills of Kidderminster, who was only eighteen when meningitis claimed him in January of this year, barely weeks after beginning his studies at the Liverpool Academy of Learning. His father had believed him vaccinated and discovered too late that there are, regrettably, several strains. One trusts the Kingdom’s young people will present their arms promptly and without theatre.
In news that will strike every soul who has ever sat wincing in a dental chair as both outrageous and entirely plausible, the National Health Society‘s dental deserts are now consuming university savings funds. One young man of nineteen, resident in North Yorkshire, spent nearly eight hundred pounds of money his grandparents had carefully set aside for his studies – a full third of the sum – on two fillings and two replacement fillings, because no National Health Society dentist could be found within reasonable distance. Had he been seen on the proper public scheme, the treatment would have cost him nothing, he being under nineteen and in full-time education. Private consultation fees have risen by three-and-twenty per cent in two years. A simple extraction now commands a hundred and thirty-nine pounds. Root canal treatment in certain parts of the Kingdom reaches six hundred and sixty pounds. This Author’s teeth ache merely from reading the figures. The National Health Society was, one vaguely recalls, supposed to prevent precisely this sort of thing.
And finally, because even the gravest of Fridays must end somewhere, the Meteorological Office has delivered its verdict on the coming weekend with the particular combination of promise and disappointment at which it excels. Summer warmth will return – hurrah. A heatwave it will not be – of course not. High pressure, which had been forecasted to drape itself obligingly across the entire Kingdom, has elected instead to stall somewhere to the west and dispatch cool north-westerly winds in its stead. The south of the Southern Kingdom may expect temperatures of sixteen to three-and-twenty degrees and sunshine with good manners. North Britain and the northern counties may expect cloud, showers, and gusts of forty miles per hour. Pollen, we are additionally warned, will be high to very high across the Southern Kingdom, the Principality, and the Northern Province. The British summer, in other words, will continue to negotiate.
I am, as ever, your most devoted observer – Lady Whistledown.