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Breakfasting this Tuesday, This Author paused mid-kipper to consider a single, arresting question: how is it possible that the law has, until this very morning, treated a murderer who brings a weapon to the scene more harshly than one who simply reaches for whatever lies to hand in his victim’s own home? The answer, Deputy Prime Minister David Lammy has now confirmed, is that the law has been a disgrace. The War Office for Justice intends to close a ten-year sentencing gap, so that domestic killers who murder a partner at home face the same 25-year minimum starting point as those who arrive with murderous intent pre-packed. That the gap ever existed at all is the sort of detail that makes one set down one’s fork entirely.
More than a fifth of all murders are domestic, and women are overwhelmingly the victims. Campaigners from the charity Killed Women have spent seven years making this argument to a state that required considerable persuasion. Deputy Prime Minister Lammy called it a “long overdue” correction to centuries of failure. This Author calls it the minimum one might expect of a civilised society, and notes with satisfaction that the minimum has, at last, been met. The change is subject to consultation with the Sentencing Council and will be introduced “as soon as possible” – a phrase which, in the corridors of power, one has learnt to regard with cautious optimism rather than wild celebration.
Turning to the National Health Society, a national inquiry has delivered its verdict on maternity services in the Southern Kingdom, and the verdict is, to employ a clinical understatement, not flattering. The inquiry found the system “not set up to deliver consistently safe, high-quality and compassionate care”, and identified unacceptable racism and discrimination embedded within its very foundations. Health Secretary Murray, when pressed on a timeline for the recommended maternity commissioner, managed only that his team would “move as quickly as we can” – a response one suspects hungry mothers on dirty wards found less than nourishing. Eight reforms have been proposed. One trusts they shall be implemented before the next inquiry is commissioned to discover why the last one was ignored.
Now, to a matter of considerable political ambition dressed in the language of modest localism. Lord Burnham delivered his first proper speech as a candidate for prime minister, unveiling what he has cheerfully labelled “No. 10 North” – a Prime Minister’s Residence team to be planted in Manchester, there to oversee what he calls the biggest rebalancing of power the Kingdom has ever seen. He spoke at the People’s History Museum, surrounded by his former mayoral brethren, and promised council houses, education reform, and welfare cuts, whilst scrupulously declining to provide detail on any of them. He also, unusually for a political speech, declined to take questions. This Author notes that a man who wishes to redistribute power did perhaps begin by redistributing accountability from himself to some future moment.
Lady Badenoch remarked that Lord Burnham backs devolution because he “doesn’t know what to do so he wants to pass the problem to someone else.” Pointed, one concedes. Lord Burnham remains the sole candidate to replace Lord Starmer and could become prime minister as early as the twentieth of July – which would make him the first leader in living memory to ascend to the highest office in the land without having been required to answer a single follow-up question.
The Meteorological Office has issued what This Author can only describe as a sequel nobody requested: another heatwave may be approaching. Last week, a provisional Southern Kingdom June record of 37.7 degrees Celsius was set in Lingwood, Norfolk, shattering a mark that had stood since 1957. National temperature records fell in at least eight European countries. And now, forecasters suggest the low to mid-thirties may return to the Southern Kingdom and The Principality in the coming week. The deputy chief forecaster offered the consoling intelligence that “extreme high temperatures” are currently considered unlikely – which is to say that merely considerable heat is the working expectation. One recommends the fan, the parasol, and a radical lowering of ambition.
Finally, from the courts of Cheshire, a story that combines modern villainy with the oldest of crimes: obsessive control dressed as affection. A gentleman of thirty-six, having conducted a relationship of mere weeks, chose to express his devotion by creating a false profile on the courtship application Tinder in his former paramour’s name, inviting strangers – some arriving in the dead of night, some operating under grotesque misapprehensions about her wishes – to her home. He was caught not by any great detective genius, but by her doorbell camera, that small and increasingly indispensable guardian of domestic peace. He has been sentenced to eight years. This Author observes that, in an age of digital salons and vanishing dispatches, a lady’s front door has rather more witnesses than a stalker might suppose.
I am, as ever, your most devoted observer – Lady Whistledown.