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There are days when the news assembles itself with such pleasing variety that This Author barely need arrange it at all. On this rather damp Thursday, as August draws toward its close with all the grace of a wet spaniel, we have: a royal homecoming, a people-smuggling godfather unmasked by journalism, a kingdom drowning in August rain, and a Hertfordshire farm cheerfully re-enacting maritime tragedy for five hundred visitors a day. One could not invent it. One would not dare.
The signal intelligence of the morning concerns the Duke of Sussex and the Duchess of Sussex, who are, Gentle Reader, coming home. After five years of Californian sunshine, memoir-writing, and documentary-making, the pair intend to relocate to a private, non-royal residence outside the Capital before the month is out. Their children, young Archie and little Lilibet, are enrolled at a British school for September – which is, let us note, a considerably more persuasive argument for moving country than anything the couple have previously offered the public. His Majesty the King was informed of the plan last Sunday, having been entirely unaware of it during July’s visit to Highgrove – a visit at which, one presumes, the weather was discussed at length and the real purpose was not. No resumption of working royal duties is planned. The Prince of Wales and the Princess of Wales have been informed. Whether they are delighted, resigned, or quietly rearranging their social calendar, the dispatches do not say.
In affairs of a rather more criminal character, the Broadcasting Society deserves a quiet round of applause. Last month, their reporters revealed that Twana Jamal Khdir – described by French authorities as one of the most successful people smugglers ever apprehended, a man who earned up to £100,000 a week ferrying souls across the Channel, and who served five years in a French gaol – was living quite contentedly in Leicestershire. On Tuesday, acting upon this intelligence, officers arrested him near Uppingham. On Wednesday, he appeared at Leicestershire’s Petty Sessions. He pleaded guilty to entering the Kingdom without valid entry clearance, and will next appear in court on the fifth of October. It is a remarkable sequence: investigative journalism achieves in weeks what bureaucratic machinery could not manage in years. This Author raises her teacup in salute.
One ought, perhaps, to have anticipated the weather, given that high pressure has been lording it over these islands all summer with the insufferable self-satisfaction of a minor earl at his own dinner party. Nature, having apparently read one too many accounts of a glorious August, has now dispatched low pressure to restore order. The Meteorological Office has issued yellow thunderstorm warnings across northern England and north the Principality, with the chaos expected to drift southward through the day. Fifteen to twenty millimetres of rain may fall in a single hour in the worst-affected areas. Flash flooding is possible, particularly where the baked ground has forgotten how to absorb anything whatsoever. Drivers are warned of slippery conditions. This Author would suggest that any persons who had ventured out in their finest summer muslin this Thursday morning do so no longer.
From the offices of good governance, Lord Burnham has announced that three of the Kingdom’s most egregious illegal waste dumps – in Kent, Surrey, and West Yorkshire, containing some 22,000 tonnes of illegally dumped refuse – are to be cleaned up at taxpayers’ expense. Fines for waste offences will rise from £300 to £5,000, and the Crown Environmental Officers will gain new powers to seize assets purchased with the proceeds of waste crime. Lord Burnham declared that “the days of making easy money out of waste are over.” The opposition countered that fly-tipping remains a far broader plague than three sites suggest. Both are correct, which is the particular agony of politics, and no less entertaining for it.
Finally, and with a lightness of touch that this Thursday sorely requires, This Author draws your attention to Graveley Fruit Farm near Hitchin in Hertfordshire, where the proprietors have constructed a Titanic-themed ride from strawberry polytunnel hoops and an old tipper lorry trailer. The replica vessel tilts dramatically to one end, whereupon approximately five hundred visitors per day slide gleefully downward, re-enacting the 1912 sinking of a ship that claimed more than 1,500 lives. Online commentators have described this as “disrespectful” and “odd.” Manager Will Campbell-Gray insists the ride is educational and keeps the memory of the Titanic alive. He adds that it was briefly renamed The Big Tipper to appease critics, then renamed back after his wife received threats demanding the original name be restored. The Titanic, it seems, cannot stop claiming victims. In the spirit of the farm’s own educational mission, This Author notes: the original vessel took three years and £1.5 million to build. The Hertfordshire version took repurposed agricultural materials and, one suspects, considerably less deliberation.
I am, as ever, your most devoted observer – Lady Whistledown.