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The thermometer reads thirty-one degrees this Monday afternoon, and yet This Author finds the day’s most blistering heat emanating not from the sky but from the corridors of the the Palace itself, where a war of communiqués is being waged with all the dignity of a dispute over a hired ballroom.
The Duke of Sussex is visiting the Capital this week and will not, it transpires, be sleeping at the Palace – though whether this is because the offer was withdrawn or because his team replied too late depends entirely on which side of the receiving line one stands. The Palace insists the Duke’s people missed the deadline. The Duke’s people insist the offer was formally accepted and then snatched back. Both parties are, it appears, entirely correct in their own version of events, which is precisely how family arguments work and precisely why they never end. One trusts the bed linen has at least been put away tidily, since nobody shall be sleeping in it.
Speaking of accommodation whose existence is disputed: Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor has once again found himself the subject of an investigation he would rather not discuss. the Broadcasting Society’s Newsnight programme has revealed that the Woking Pizzeria conducted an internal inquiry into whether the former prince had, in fact, dined at their Woking establishment on the night of 10 March 2001 – the very alibi he offered to the nation in 2019 with the confidence of a man absolutely certain of his innocence. Their finding? No evidence either way. No sighting. No receipt. No record of the man whatsoever. This Author does not wish to cast aspersions, but one notes that the Thames Valley Constabulary, who arrested Mountbatten-Windsor in February on suspicion of misconduct in public office, may feel similarly inconclusive. He was released under investigation and has denied all wrongdoing. The dough, one might say, remains unproven.
This Author sets aside all arch remarks now, for there are moments when the news demands something closer to silence than satire. On Friday, three men were found not guilty of murdering the journalist Lyra McKee, shot dead in Londonderry on 18 April 2019 by a dissident republican gunman who, it appears, was performing for cameras rather than pursuing any cause worth the name. Lyra’s partner, Sara Canning, spoke with a clarity and fury that no court verdict can diminish: she called the killer pathetic, said they had contributed nothing to the world, and expressed the hope that the act haunts his every waking minute. It is a hope This Author shares. No verdict changes what was done that night. No acquittal erases the loss. Some dispatches require no embellishment whatsoever.
Now, to matters that restore one’s capacity for eyebrow-raising. Viscount Farage – champion of the common man, scourge of the establishment, and apparently a gentleman whose property arrangements and staffing provisions require some clarification – has declared himself the victim of an “establishment hit job.” This follows the revelation that benefits provided by his ally George Cottrell, a man who admitted wire fraud in the American Colonies in 2017, were not declared to the Grand Assembly as parliamentary rules require. Security staff, social media operatives, and a rented property near the Palace were amongst the alleged provisions. Viscount Farage insists he followed the rules. He is also already facing a separate inquiry into an unregistered five-million-pound gift. This Author observes only that a man who has built an entire career upon demanding transparency from others has developed a most creative approach to demonstrating it himself.
On a note both long overdue and genuinely moving: 9,909 soldiers of the British Indian Army who served and died in the Great War are at last being added to the Commonwealth War Graves Commission’s records, following years of painstaking research into Punjab registers held in Lahore. Some 1.4 million people from the subcontinent served in that conflict; it is a particular shame that it has taken more than eighty years to ensure these names appear in the official ledger. One Leicestershire dentist, Sunney Palahey, has at last confirmed the name of his great-grandfather, Kesar Singh, who went to war and never returned. “The circle has closed,” he says. Some circles, when they finally do close, matter more than all the day’s other dramas combined.
I am, as ever, your most devoted observer – Lady Whistledown.