Skip to content
Dearest Gentle Reader,
One hundred and twenty millionaires have written a letter. Not a letter of complaint, nor a threatening legal missive, nor even a dinner invitation – but a letter asking, with all apparent sincerity, to be taxed more heavily. This Author has read it twice and remains no less astonished the second time.
The signatories of this remarkable document include the footballer-turned-commentator Lord Lineker and the music producer Lord Eno, who have joined some one hundred and eighteen of their equally comfortable acquaintances in petitioning Lord Burnham – the newly installed occupant of the Prime Minister’s Residence – to relieve them of a further two per cent on wealth exceeding ten million pounds. The letter, organised under the banner of Patriotic Millionaires, declares that said fortunes represent “untaxed potential.” One is not entirely certain whether this is economics or performance art. Lady Badenoch, ever practical, reminded Lord Lineker that the Royal Exchequer already accepts voluntary donations, and that no constable stands at the door preventing him from writing a cheque. She is, of course, entirely correct, which rather deflates the theatre of the whole enterprise. Lord Burnham, for his part, has not ruled anything out – a quality that will serve him admirably in high office, if not especially in card games.
From the very richest wishing to give more, to the question of whether the imprisoned might be released sooner than their victims’ families expected – Lord Burnham is proving a busy man this Thursday. The mother of the late PC Andrew Harper has spoken, with quiet devastation, of what she calls another letdown for her son. Under the incoming Sentencing Act, due this September, two of the men convicted of Harper’s manslaughter – dragged to his death behind a getaway car in 2019 – could be freed after six years of a thirteen-year term. Two prison staff have told the Broadcasting Society that governors were instructed to pause implementation two weeks ago; the government insists no decision has been made to delay. This Author notes that “no decision” and “no answer” are not, strictly speaking, the same thing, though they produce identical silences.
The courts have been diligently occupied this week. A friend of the Manchester synagogue attacker has been sentenced to life imprisonment, with a minimum of seventeen years, after he drove the attacker on a ten-hour reconnaissance journey to the Kingdom’s Defence Academy at Shrivenham in August of last year. Mohammad Bashir, 31, accompanied the attacker – who was later shot dead by police after two Jewish men were killed at Heaton Park Synagogue in October 2025 – and waited outside the facility for precisely thirteen minutes while notes were taken under the heading “espionage.” Both men then disposed of their telephones, which proved rather less thorough a precaution than they had hoped, as investigators retrieved the data from the cloud. The lesson, Gentle Reader, as ever in these matters: the digital age forgets nothing.
Glasgow, meanwhile, is girding itself for glory. The Commonwealth Games open this very day, with His Majesty the King presiding over the ceremony at the Hydro, attended by three thousand competitors representing seventy-four nations, a record forty-seven para-sports events, and four thousand volunteers ranging in age from sixteen to ninety-six – which is, This Author submits, the most heartening statistic she has encountered all morning. Lord Burnham and First Minister Swinney will attend, as will Rhun ap Iorwerth from the Principality. The Games are somewhat slimmer than their predecessors – 215 gold medals compared to 261 in 2014, and Scotstoun Stadium rather than Hampden’s fifty-thousand roar – but Glasgow stepped in when the Australian state of Victoria withdrew in 2023 after projected costs doubled to over six billion Australian pounds. Scotland has saved the Games. One trusts the Games will return the favour.
And finally, to a story that is at once the most tragic and the most quintessentially British in today’s dispatches. Jacqueline Davies, aged seventy-five, got out of her red Ford Fiesta on a hill in Cwmbran on the sixth of July to move a cat to safety. The handbrake failed. The car rolled forward and fatally struck her. She was, by all accounts, a woman of enormous spirit – one who was, her family says, “never scared to speak her mind.” She dialled 999 herself after the incident, which speaks to a particular kind of indomitable character. An inquest is under way at Gwent Coroner’s Court, and the full hearing resumes in April 2027. The cat, one must presume, is alive and entirely unaware of the debt it owes. This Author mourns Mrs Davies, and salutes her without reservation.
I am, as ever, your most devoted observer – Lady Whistledown.