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Dearest Gentle Reader,
This Author has surveyed the seven days just concluded and found them to possess a single, unifying quality: a magnificent, unrelenting inability to behave. The week opened, as Heat, Heartbreak, and a Member of Parliament Who Ought to Have Stayed Home made plain, with a sky in open rebellion against the comfort of the Kingdom – two thousand seven hundred reasons, no less, to take the season seriously. The ton declined. The ton has continued to decline all week, sweating elegantly through its own poor judgment.
By Tuesday, as Terror, Fire, and the Peculiar Comfort of Being Told It Could All Be Worse recorded, nineteen wildfires and a counter-terrorism inquiry had arrived together, quite uninvited. Wednesday offered Curfews, Conspiracies, and a Kingdom That Cannot Find Its Shade – including a curfew so easily dismantled that This Author suspects the teenagers consulted on its design. Thursday gave us Passive, Patriotic, and Penalised, in which the national footballing endeavour collapsed with a thoroughness that can only be described as commitment.
Friday baked. Specifically, it baked a mayor out of Manchester and into higher office, as Steel, Heat, and a Mayor Who Could Not Wait to Leave Manchester observed with appropriate dryness. Saturday produced Lord Burnham Inherits the Keys, the Mess, and Thirty-Four Candidates Who Have Nothing Better to Do, among them a Count Binface, whose candidacy This Author declines to mock, as he has already done it so magnificently himself. And Sunday, that nominal day of rest, delivered Trainers to Tie, Fingerprints to Queues, and Brothers Most Infamously Detained – fifty-nine charges, one buried billion, and a man who changed his shoes somewhere on the road to power.
The pattern, Gentle Reader, is not subtle. A Kingdom melting from above, reforming itself below, and throughout it all conducting its most extraordinary business as though nothing peculiar were occurring whatsoever. This Author would not have it any other way.
Yours, in perpetual and delighted observation,
Lady Whistledown