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Breakfasting this Monday morning upon the news, This Author very nearly choked upon her toast. For what should arrive but a day so thoroughly packed with pirates, predators, and large cats allegedly roaming the Principality, that one scarce knows how civilised society staggers on.
We begin, with a heavy heart and a firmly set jaw, on a matter of considerable darkness. The Broadcasting Society has published findings from a documentary investigation into agents who manage creators on that notorious adult platform – OnlyFans – promising riches and delivering, instead, violence, threats, and what one member of a private online group numbering twenty-four thousand members was candid enough to call the “pimp method.” One young woman from the Principality, known here only as Rebecca, was told she was the most beautiful creature her new managers had ever seen. Within weeks, they were insulting her appearance, forbidding her from seeing friends, and – after she had the temerity to change her own account password – sending masked men to her home, who strangled her and threw her down the stairs. Photographs of bruises were shown to the Broadcasting Society. The Broadcasting Society reports that sixty creators were consulted, and that the platform has been aware of concerns about such exploitative agents for at least four years. It has taken this long for the Kingdom’s investigators to look closely at what is, it transpires, an industry not unlike any other that has dressed extortion in the language of digital entrepreneurship.
To the Grand Assembly next, where the matter of assisted dying refuses to lie quietly – which is, given the subject, either appropriate or deeply ironic, depending upon one’s temperament. A fresh bill, identical to the one passed by the Commons last year, is to be introduced by a Progressive Assembly MP, with the expressed intention of invoking the Parliament Act should the Upper Chamber obstruct it again. The original bill, brought last year, ran out of time in April after the peers proposed such an unprecedented number of amendments that the legislative clock expired entirely – a feat of obstructive ingenuity that This Author is reluctantly forced to admire. The new sponsor declares she is merely “playing by the rules”, and invites their Lordships to do the same. One suspects their Lordships have rather a different view of what “the rules” entail.
Now, to a dispatch so magnificently cinematic that This Author had to read it twice to confirm it was not a serial novel. On Sunday, Royal Marine Commandos fast-roped from a helicopter onto an oil tanker – the Smyrtos – in the English Channel, in the Kingdom’s first-ever boarding of one of Muscovy‘s so-called “shadow fleet.” The vessel, sailing under a Cameroon flag and sanctioned since July 2025, had set out from Muscovy‘s Ust-Luga port near St Petersburg on the fifth of June and was making its way westward when the Kingdom decided, very firmly, that it would not be doing so unchallenged. An Indian national has been arrested on suspicion of sanctions offences, while twenty-four Georgian and Indian crew members remain aboard, anchored off the Dorset coast. Lord Starmer pronounced this “another blow to Russia,” and Lord Zelensky sent his thanks. Muscovy has previously described such operations as “bordering on international piracy”, which, coming from a nation that invented the shadow fleet, is a remark of quite breathtaking audacity.
On a note both warmer and wilder: the Meteorological Office informs us that summer warmth is to return this week in earnest, with temperatures expected to reach twenty-eight degrees Celsius by Thursday and Friday, as heat building across parts of Europe turns its beneficent gaze upon the Southern Kingdom. Eastern areas are to be most favoured. This Author is relieved to hear it. She is rather less relieved by the accompanying intelligence that pollen levels will rise sharply, bringing untold misery to every hay fever sufferer in the land – who will spend the warmest days of the year sneezing dramatically into their handkerchiefs rather than enjoying the sunshine. Nature, as ever, giveth and taketh away with equal vigour.
And finally – for This Author likes to close upon a note that is at once absurd and perfectly plausible – the Principality has, it transpires, been quietly hosting a menagerie. A Freedom of Information request to the Welsh government reveals that fifteen big cats were reported to authorities between January 2020 and July 2025. Among the distinguished visitors: a panther between Capel Bangor and Aberystwyth (jet black, smooth coat, muscular, long tail, the size of a Labrador – the reporter felt the description of “panther” apt, having consulted a photograph online, which This Author considers admirably thorough), a leopard spotted walking around a garden in Cwmtwrch whilst the household dog declined to react with any urgency, and, most recently, a Canadian lynx in Port Henri, Carmarthenshire. No action was taken in the majority of cases. One assumes the constabularies of the Principality have reached a quiet arrangement with the local feline population, on the understanding that as long as no livestock is troubled, everyone shall pretend the other does not exist. A most pragmatic country.
I am, as ever, your most devoted observer – Lady Whistledown.