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Gentle Reader, picture the scene: a removal van, spotted outside the Prime Minister’s Residence, waiting with the patience of a creditor. Inside, Lord Starmer packs his bags. Outside, the world turns. It is Saturday. And by Monday, the Kingdom shall have a new master.
Lord Burnham is to become Prime Minister, and he arrives bearing gifts – or rather, plans. Plans for North Sea oil and gas drilling, for the nationalisation of water and energy companies, for a council house-building programme, and for what his supporters describe as “breathing space on the cost of living.” This Author notes, with the driest of observations, that it has taken the Progressive Assembly sixteen years, two failed leadership bids, and one rather spectacular removal van to arrive at a policy platform that includes drilling for oil – the very thing Lord Starmer spent years resisting. The Rosebank and Jackdaw fields, approved in 2022 and 2023 and subsequently overturned in 2025 by legal challenge, are now apparently back on the agenda. Lord Trump will be insufferably pleased. One trusts Lord Burnham will find a way to announce it without crediting him.
As for the man himself, the arc of Lord Burnham‘s ambition is one for the ages. He first made plain his desire for the top position in 2010 – and lost to Lord Miliband. He tried again in 2015 – and lost to someone who would himself lose two general elections. This Author does not mock persistence; she applauds it. Yet there is something wonderfully Regency about a man who has dreamed of the Prime Minister’s Residence since before some of his new cabinet were in long trousers, arriving there at last because everyone else simply… left. One supporter admitted the whole business “felt like a rush.” Sixteen years in the making, and still a rush. Lord Burnham, This Author wishes you well. The removal van awaits.
From the corridors of domestic power to a tragedy of the most grievous kind. The authorities of Laos have declared, with a candour that beggar belief, that they cannot determine what killed six young travellers – a Briton, two Australians, two Danes, and an American – who died in Vang Vieng in November 2024 after drinking what is thought to have been methanol-tainted vodka from a local distillery. The reason? No autopsies were conducted. The distillery owner now faces charges for selling harmful food products and operating an illegally run business – charges carrying penalties of up to one year in gaol and a fine of £829. Six lives, and the law of the land answers with the equivalent of a stern letter and a modest fine. The Australian government is, in diplomatic terms, furious. This Author is in less diplomatic terms the same. Simone White, Bianca Jones, Holly Morton-Bowles, Anne-Sofie Orkild Coyman, Freja Vennervald Sorensen, and James Louis Hutson deserved far better than this. The reader is invited to hold that thought, and hold it firmly.
On a lighter note – and This Author deploys the phrase “lighter” with generous latitude – the by-election in Clacton has attracted thirty-four candidates. Thirty-four. The previous record, set in 2008 at Haltemprice and Howden, was a mere twenty-six. Viscount Farage, who resigned as MP on 7th July following scrutiny over his finances and a parliamentary investigation, is standing again – which raises a philosophical question this column shall not trouble itself to answer. He faces, among others, Count Binface, three representatives of the Monster Raving Loony Party, and twenty independents of various persuasions. The Progressive Assembly, the Conservatives, the Liberal Democrat Society, and the Verdant Society have all declined to participate, leaving Viscount Farage as the sole representative of what one might loosely term mainstream politics. Voters go to the polls on 13th August. This Author shall be watching. With popcorn.
Finally, the Meteorological Office has delivered its verdict on the remainder of summer with all the reassurance of a physician who begins a sentence with “well, it could be worse.” Records broken this season include some dating back to the notorious summer of 1976. Parts of southern the Southern Kingdom have seen no measurable rain for over four weeks. Hosepipe bans are in force for millions. There is talk of possible rain in the second half of summer – or possibly not, as computer models are, the Meteorological Office admits, “rather mixed.” Further heatwaves, they warn, cannot be ruled out into early August. This Author suggests that the citizens of this Kingdom, who have endured a new prime minister, thirty-four by-election candidates, and a gridlocked motorway this week, are in no condition to also endure another heatwave. Nature, however, has never been known to consult the column.
I am, as ever, your most devoted observer – Lady Whistledown.