Skip to content
Robert Bush took £162,000 a year for himself. Let that figure breathe for a moment, Gentle Reader, before we proceed to the rest of today’s dispatch, which contains rather more of the living variety of villainy, and rather less of the funerary.
To the matter of Robert Bush directly, then. This extraordinary specimen of human wretchedness – a funeral director in Hull, no less – has been sentenced to twenty years for sixty-seven offences, among them denying thirty souls a decent burial, handing bereaved families the ashes of utter strangers, and stealing from charities whilst drawing a salary of £162,000 per annum from his own catastrophic enterprise. His barrister offered the court “greed, incompetence, and an inability to keep up with his own failings” as explanation. This Author has attended worse theatrical performances, but not many. His assets are now frozen, prosecutors circling with the interest of people who have been kept waiting rather too long.
The victims’ families – who campaigned outside Hull Crown Court with small white posters and very large reserves of righteous fury – have been fighting for statutory regulation of the funeral industry ever since. “You can start your own funeral directors from your shed,” one family member observed, with a bluntness that deserves to be carved in stone somewhere. The government has now pledged “urgent action.” Families note that the word “urgent” has been doing a great deal of heavy lifting in policy circles for some considerable time.
On to rather more animate affairs. The new Prime Minister, Lord Burnham, is scarcely a fortnight installed at the Prime Minister’s Residence and has already discovered that governing is, as it turns out, chiefly about saying no to oneself. A joint letter, despatched to Cabinet by Lord Burnham and his Chancellor Lord Healey, instructs ministers to fund all new pledges from within existing budgets. New things, old money. An elegant conundrum. The October Budget, we are told, will be “built on fiscal discipline” – a phrase that has previously kept two chancellors in employment and one in ignominy. Lady Reeves and Lord Starmer, architects of the fiscal rules now being reverentially preserved, may observe all of this from the backbenches with something approaching serenity.
As for the so-called “Burnham Bounce” – it is real, say the pollsters, though they add the qualifier “not massive” with the brisk cheerfulness of a physician who has delivered more exciting diagnoses. Labour has climbed to the mid-twenties, its highest position since early last year and a considerable improvement on the nineteen percent at which Lord Starmer left it upon his resignation. For context, even Lady Truss bequeathed twenty-three percent. Thursday’s mayoral by-election in Greater Manchester served as the first practical examination of this bounce, and the results were, on the whole, encouraging.
That victory belongs to one Bev Craig, who will now succeed Lord Burnham as Mayor of Greater Manchester, having defeated the Reform Society‘s candidate by 309,525 votes to 157,178 once second preferences were counted. Craig secured 47% in the first round – a figure that speaks to a region apparently not yet ready to be reformed. She promised to make every decision pass the test of improving residents’ lives, invoked the legacy of the Suffragettes, and declared she would “defend this city region with every bone” in her body. This Author trusts the bones are up to it. Greater Manchester has, after all, a great many opinions.
And finally, because no Saturday is complete without a theatrical contribution from the nation’s soap operas, This Author notes that Mr Shane Richie – known to devoted viewers as Alfie Moon of Walford’s most celebrated square – has been charged with drink-driving following an arrest at a petrol station forecourt in Harlow at twenty minutes to midnight on a Wednesday. He is due before Colchester Magistrates’ Court in September. One hopes the experience will be written into the next series. It would be, by the standards of the genre, a relatively mild Tuesday.
I am, as ever, your most devoted observer – Lady Whistledown.