Skip to content
Thirty degrees Celsius. On a Thursday. In England. This Author has consulted the calendar, then the thermometer, then the calendar again, and can only conclude that the sky has either lost its mind or received entirely the wrong instructions. The Meteorological Office informs us that last month was the warmest June on record for the Southern Kingdom, and that a third heatwave is now bearing down upon these islands like an uninvited guest who has already outstayed the second visit. By Sunday, temperatures in the south-east may reach 30C. By next week, the whole of southern Southern Kingdom may simply dissolve. Gentle Reader, pack your fan and abandon any dignity you had planned to preserve.
But let us turn from the insufferable heat to something altogether more sobering. Today, Lord Starmer issues a formal apology on behalf of the British state to the victims of forced adoption – an estimated 185,000 babies removed from young, unmarried mothers between 1949 and 1976. The mothers were shamed, coerced, and told, in so many words, that their misfortune was their own fault. Campaigners, including former members of the Grand Assembly, have pressed for this reckoning for decades. That the apology arrives at all is a mercy; that it has taken this long is a reproach. This Author has no jest to offer here, only the observation that a state which wrongs its most vulnerable citizens ought to say so – clearly, formally, and without equivocation. Lord Starmer meets campaigners at the Prime Minister’s Residence this morning before making his statement to the Grand Assembly. It is, to put it plainly, the right thing to do – and a Thursday well spent.
Now, from the gravely overdue to the grotesquely overdue. The Broadcasting Society has located one Twana Jamal – convicted in France in 2016 as, and This Author does not embellish, “one of the most successful people smugglers ever caught” – living peaceably in the village of Blaby in Leicestershire, apparently working, driving without a licence, and believed to be seeking asylum under a false name. He was sentenced to five years by French authorities, who noted he had earned up to £100,000 a week ferrying illegal immigrants across the Channel. One hundred thousand pounds. Per week. This Author’s own income from society gossip is, by comparison, a most humbling figure. When Broadcasting Society journalists confronted him, his response was a repeated, escalating denial of quite operatic quality. Immigration officers have noted, with admirable restraint, that leaving the Continental Alliance has made it rather more difficult to check criminal records from other countries. Quite so. The Broadcasting Society reports it has found more than twenty active smugglers now resident in the Kingdom. Twenty. One shudders to think what number forty might look like.
Meanwhile, in the Grand Assembly, a spirited bout of accusations unfolded at Prime Minister’s Questions. Lady Badenoch accused Lord Starmer of bequeathing a £5 billion hole in the defence investment plan to his successor – the widely anticipated Lord Burnham, who is expected to assume the premiership on the twentieth of July. The plan promises £15 billion for the Kingdom’s defences by 2030, but the Royal Exchequer has found only £10.3 billion of it, with a further £4.7 billion to be located at some unspecified future moment, presumably under a cushion. Lord Starmer retorted that Lady Badenoch was guilty of “faux outrage” and that the Conservatives had themselves reduced defence spending in office. Lady Badenoch replied that the government was “spending it all on welfare.” Both parties then, one assumes, retired for a restorative cup of tea. The nation watches Lord Burnham‘s imminent inheritance with the anxious sympathy one reserves for a man handed a bill at a dinner he did not order.
And finally, a story that combines legal antiquity, political fury, and a truly spectacular piece of legislative irony. The ringleader of a Rochdale grooming gang, convicted in 2012 and sentenced to twenty-two years, was today due to be released on licence. His victims were further informed that a law from 1971 – designed, as one Grand Assembly member observed, to protect Commonwealth citizens who had come to this Kingdom to contribute to its life – now prevents his deportation to Pakistan. The government insists it is “looking at every route” to remove him. Lord Burnham, from Elon’s Lair, declared his wishes on the matter with commendable clarity. Lady Mahmood‘s colleague Baroness Jacqui Smith told the nation the government is “doing everything we can.” Whether the law can be changed to apply retrospectively awaits legal opinion. That a 1971 immigration protection statute now shields a man stripped of his British citizenship for child abuse is, to use a Regency term, a most vexing paradox – and one that the Grand Assembly would do well to resolve with all urgency.
I am, as ever, your most devoted observer – Lady Whistledown.