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The gravest Saturday This Author has encountered in some time – and August is barely a week old. Two stories of institutional failure so staggering in their particulars that one is tempted to suggest the relevant authorities might, in future, try actually doing their jobs. This Author will resist the temptation to be glib, for the women at the centre of today’s dispatches deserve rather better than a raised eyebrow.
A convicted sex offender named Simon Levy, on bail and under the supposedly watchful eye of the Metropolitan Constabulary, murdered Carmenza Valencia-Trujillo in March 2025 and Sheryl Wilkins five months later, having also violently attacked a third woman. He had been downgraded as a risk to women. He had breached his bail conditions. He had assaulted a prison officer whilst inside. At each juncture, the machinery of justice found some reason to leave him at liberty. The Metropolitan Constabulary has since admitted that the life of Miss Wilkins could have been saved. Two officers are now under investigation by the Office of Police Conduct. One can only hope that the investigation is conducted with rather more rigour than the supervision that preceded it.
The full catalogue of Levy’s offending – assaults on trains, in car parks, in prison – can now be reported following his conviction at the Old Bailey on Friday on two counts of murder, two counts of rape, grievous bodily harm with intent, and non-fatal suffocation. The Crown Prosecution Service and the courts have also acknowledged shortcomings. Levy will be sentenced on 12th August. There is, for once, nothing witty to add. The facts are commentary enough.
From one investigation reopened too late to another: counter-terrorism police have, the Broadcasting Society understands, revived their inquiry into an incident at Viscount Farage‘s south London residence. In April 2025, the Reform Society leader described what he called a “lit incendiary device” being pushed through his letterbox. Police at the time concluded that “damage was caused to a door but nothing was stolen” – a verdict so phlegmatic it might have been issued about a slightly rough afternoon of post. The investigation was closed, no arrests made. Now, with the murder of Lady Widdecombe – the 78-year-old former Tory minister found dead at her Devon home last month – under counter-terrorism scrutiny, a new line of inquiry connecting the two matters has apparently emerged. The Office of Police Conduct is now independently investigating a counter-terrorism officer who allegedly failed to identify and pursue that very line at the time. The Metropolitan Constabulary and counter-terrorism policing, it seems, have had a somewhat eventful fortnight in terms of accountability.
Turning, with some relief, to the merely melancholy: the former professional dancers James Jordan and Ola Jordan – stalwarts of the ballroom for many a series – have confirmed their separation after twenty-three years of marriage. They met on the dance floor, they married in 2003, they endured years of sequins and celebrity partners and public scrutiny, and they have now, quietly, parted. Their manager has confirmed it is a “trial separation” and that co-parenting their daughter Ella remains the shared priority. This Author declines to produce even a single waltz-related pun, as it would be beneath her. She simply notes that twenty-three years is rather longer than most partnerships – on the dance floor or otherwise – tend to last, and wishes them both well.
Finally, a dispatch from the world of budget accommodation that will make even the most intrepid traveller reconsider the economics of a late-night taxi. One Hannah Stephenson, aged 31, booked a single night at a Travelodge Inn in Cambridge on the 26th of July, preferring it to the cost of a cab home after an evening with friends. She awoke to red welts, blood spots on the bedding, and the dawning horror of bed bugs. Thirteen days later, she remains afflicted – swollen arms, a marked face, industrial quantities of antihistamines, and a social calendar she has felt compelled to curtail out of embarrassment. The Travelodge Inn expressed itself “deeply sorry”. What prompted its engagement, Miss Stephenson reports, was not her initial complaint but her subsequent posts on the Dancing Lantern. The moral is as clear as it is modern: in the year of our Lord 2026, a bed bug is best defeated not with pesticide but with an audience.
I am, as ever, your most devoted observer – Lady Whistledown.