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The banana arrived first. That is, perhaps, the most extraordinary sentence This Author has composed in recent memory, and yet here we are: a Tuesday upon which 2.9 tonnes of cocaine, concealed within a consignment of fruit from South America, sailed through London Gateway Port in Essex, only to be seized by the Border Force – tipped off by the Crown’s Crime Investigators – before the unwitting courier trundled the empty trailer to Hertfordshire, blissfully unaware he was delivering precisely nothing to anyone. Nine men have since been arrested. The street value of the haul: £232 million. One trusts the bananas, at least, were perfectly ripe.
From the port of Essex to the scorched fields of the Southern Kingdom, where amber heat-health alerts now cover very nearly every county save the North East – which has been granted the modest reprieve of a yellow warning, as though the North East’s suffering is somehow less deserving of an upgrade. The Crown Health Security Agency warns of significant impacts on health and social care, including a rise in deaths. Drought officials have declared 71.3% of England to be in drought. Temperatures are expected to reach the low-to-mid-thirties by week’s end. This Author notes, with a restraint bordering on the heroic, that it is August in the Southern Kingdom, and we are somehow still surprised.
Amid the heat and the wilting, the National Health Society offers what may be the single piece of genuinely good news available to us on this parched Tuesday: the Southern Kingdom is on course to become one of the first nations in the world to eliminate hepatitis C. More than 100,000 people have been diagnosed and treated since 2015. Deaths from the virus have fallen by 36% in the last decade. An eight-to-twelve-week course of antiviral tablets cures more than 95% of cases. This Author, who has watched the National Health Society endure a decade of rather less flattering headlines, finds it only right to pause and record a genuine triumph when one presents itself.
On the matter of PC Harper‘s killers and their prospective early release, there is at last a glimmer of something that resembles governmental backbone. PC Harper‘s mother has received a telephone call from the Prime Minister’s Residence – specifically from Lord Burnham‘s deputy chief of staff – conveying the Prime Minister’s wish to do “everything he can” to prevent the January release of Jessie Cole and Albert Bowers, who were sentenced to thirteen years for manslaughter in 2020. Lord Burnham has now instructed his justice secretary to find a mechanism to exclude the pair from the early release scheme. The bereaved mother told the Broadcasting Society: “For me, it’s hope, but I can’t afford to be too hopeful.” A sentiment, Gentle Reader, that This Author suspects many of us share when any government promises to find a way to do what is plainly right.
And finally, to Birmingham, where the European Athletics Championships have produced a moment of pure, unalloyed joy. Miss Amy Hunt, aged twenty-four, won the women’s 100 metres in exactly eleven seconds, claiming her first senior international gold and delivering Great Britain its first gold medal of the championships. Having accumulated, by her own cheerful account, a rather wearying string of silver medals – including world 200m silver and Commonwealth 100m silver – the young woman’s parents gifted her gold earrings ahead of the race, leaving a note that it was “time for gold.” Reader, she took the hint magnificently. A string of silvers converted to gold by a note from one’s parents: it is, This Author submits, the most charming athletic origin story of the summer.
I am, as ever, your most devoted observer – Lady Whistledown.