Skip to content
Gentle Reader, permit This Author to state plainly what the Kingdom has been too polite to say aloud: Tuesday has arrived not so much as a day of the week but as a verdict. A verdict upon our safety, our preparedness, our coastlines, and our collective habit of hoping that if one does not look directly at the catastrophe, it may resolve itself before luncheon.
It will not.
We begin with the matter that hangs heaviest over the corridors of power and, indeed, over every drawing room that possesses a newspaper and a conscience. The investigation into the death of Lady Widdecombe has passed into the hands of counter-terrorism officers, following what authorities describe as “new information and evidence” of a character sufficiently grave to warrant a re-arrest of the suspect – a man of eight-and-twenty from Rotherham – now held on suspicion of the preparation or instigation of acts of terrorism. That the suspect was entirely unknown to the government’s Prevent scheme is the detail that will haunt the Grand Assembly longest. Lady Mahmood, the Home Secretary, confirmed as much from the despatch box, and her words landed in the chamber like a stone dropped into very still water.
For it is one thing to be failed by a system that knew of a danger. It is quite another to discover that the danger existed entirely beyond the system’s sight. Sir Mason of the Broadcasting Society observes, with his customary measured gravity, that MPs now speak of their daily exposure to violence not with surprise but with a weary familiarity that is itself the most damning indictment of our age. When a parliamentarian can state, without exaggeration, that one is statistically more likely to meet a violent end as a Member of the Grand Assembly than as a soldier of the Crown, something has gone rather badly wrong with the social contract. Several members placed the blame squarely upon the digital salons, where violent language has been so thoroughly normalised that it has ceased to register as alarming – until, of course, it becomes fatal. Viscount Farage, leading voice of the Reform Society, expressed his concerns through proper channels, and even Lady Mahmood conceded the government would likely need to go further. A rare moment of consensus, purchased at the very highest price.
If the affairs of state are scorching, the rest of the Kingdom is doing its very best to compete – literally. Nineteen active wildfires now burn across the land, from the moorlands of the Peak District to the mountains of the Principality. Major incidents have been declared in Conwy and in Glossop, Derbyshire, and firefighters have been battling a blaze near Tintwistle Moor that began on the twenty-fourth of June – a fire, in other words, that has been burning for three weeks and shows no intention of concluding its engagement. The chair of the National Fire Chiefs Council warned with considerable understatement that there was “no real respite” and that the absence of forecast rain was “becoming problematic.” In the Principality, a farmer reported that his ponies had escaped, though he feared for a neighbour’s pigs before those animals too were confirmed safe. This Author notes, with some relief, that porcine fatalities have been averted. The same cannot quite be said for 642 acres of moorland and woodland, which are no longer quite as they were.
In Suffolk – a county not generally associated with dramatic incident – twelve persons were arrested in connection with an alleged right-wing terror threat to a gathering of nearly ten thousand at Shrubland Hall in Barham. The event, a peaceful assembly of faith, was brought to a close some seven hours ahead of schedule as armed officers flooded the surrounding lanes. A local resident described the scene as “absolute carnage,” though he was plainly referring to the police vehicles rather than the congregation, which departed safely. Authorities are to be commended for acting with both speed and purpose. That such a threat should arise in rural Suffolk – where the primary sources of unrest are usually disputed hedgerows and the price of asparagus – speaks to a darkness that no county, however pastoral, may assume itself exempt from.
This Author turns, with a heavy heart and a lighter pen, to the matter of Seaton Carew. A father named locally as Wayne Taylor died on Sunday alongside another man, both having entered the sea at Hartlepool to assist two children in difficulty. The children survived. The men did not. The Royal National Lifeboat Institution brought them to shore; they were pronounced dead shortly thereafter. One Mr Davey Short, passing by on foot, managed to pull one child clear on his second attempt and said, simply, that he would do it again. These are not the deaths of recklessness – they are the deaths of instinct, of fatherhood, of the deeply inconvenient human impulse to run towards danger rather than away from it. The beach has no lifeguards until the school holidays begin. A petition for extended provision has gathered more than 1,600 names. One hopes the relevant councils are reading carefully.
And so to the Moving Picture House, that great purveyor of kittens, cookery, and – it transpires – content of a rather more sinister variety. Research published this Tuesday reveals that a full year after new regulations came into force, one in ten videos recommended by the platform’s algorithm to a simulated account of a thirteen-year-old girl featured material promoting extreme calorie restriction or similarly harmful body-image content. The Office of Communications has already declared that the Moving Picture House and the Dancing Lantern are not doing enough. Google, owner of the platform, insists its commitment to removing such content is “steadfast” – a word that would carry rather more weight if the content were not, in point of fact, still there. The law permits fines of up to ten per cent of global revenues. Perhaps the time has come to discover whether the threat of a bill of truly ruinous proportions is more persuasive than a year of stern correspondence.
I am, as ever, your most devoted observer – Lady Whistledown.