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Breakfasting this Friday, This Author reached for the butter knife and discovered, instead, that the Duke of Sussex and the Duchess of Sussex are coming home. One wonders whether the butter knife, in the circumstances, is sufficient.
After six years of transatlantic self-exile, the Sussexes are to resettle upon these shores before the month is out, children enrolled in school and – if the whispers from reliable Australian quarters are to be believed – the Duchess of Sussex clutching an acting role in a top-secret production of some description. “Top secret,” Gentle Reader. In this kingdom. Where nothing has been secret since approximately 1715. Sources close to the family confirm only that the Duchess is “very excited.” This Author is very excited too, in the manner of someone watching a carriage wheel come loose at speed.
As for whether this homecoming shall soften the famously stubborn Prince of Wales, the prognosis is, to employ the clinical term, grim. “William is very stubborn,” a family friend confided to the Broadcasting Society, with an economy of diplomacy that one can only admire. The hurt lingers. The resentment festers. The brothers have been “oceans apart” – and with Harry now to be a short drive from Windsor, those oceans shall be replaced by something far more uncomfortable: a motorway and a shared grandmother’s ghost. This Author offers no prediction, only observation: proximity has never, in the history of fractious families, automatically produced warmth. It has, however, reliably produced scenes.
Meanwhile, across the water – quite literally – the Office of Home Affairs has announced that French police are now more effectively preventing small boats from crossing the Channel. One applauds. The evidence cited: 185 interceptions involving some 4,300 migrants over four separate summer weeks, and twelve dinghies stopped at sea using bold new techniques, one of which involves an officer slashing the vessel lengthways with a knife. Theatrical, certainly. Effective, apparently. The arrangement cost Lady Mahmood‘s government a mere £501 million over three years, which is, by the standards of this parliament, practically a rounding error. The Tories called it a “joke.” Crossings are nevertheless down forty per cent on last year, though 250 migrants arrived on Monday alone, so the joke, one suspects, has several punchlines yet to land.
On a note altogether more sober, This Author pauses the raised eyebrow entirely. Today marks the Kingdom’s first national day for victims and survivors of terrorism, an occasion championed for nearly five years by Travis Frain, who was nineteen years old when a terrorist’s car struck him on Westminster Bridge on 22 March 2017. He spent two years recovering from a fractured leg. He has spent the years since recovering from everything else. A two-minute silence shall be observed this afternoon in the Capital. It is a small thing, and a necessary one, for those whom catastrophe selected entirely at random. This Author, for once, has nothing clever to add.
And now, to the Royal Exchequer, where Chancellor Lord Healey – inheritor of Lady Reeves‘s fiscal rules and, one suspects, her migraines – has learned that July’s borrowing came in at £1.8 billion, some £2.3 billion worse than the forecasters had fondly imagined. The Office of National Statistics delivered this intelligence with the serene indifference of a butler announcing that the cellar has flooded. Lord Burnham and Lord Healey must now approach their October Budget – pencilled for the 27th – with the fiscal equivalent of a thimble and a prayer. “Strong fiscal discipline,” Lord Healey has vowed. Discipline, Gentle Reader, is considerably easier to promise than to practise when the welfare bill arrives £2 billion higher than expected. This Author wishes him the very best of British luck, and means it rather less cheerfully than usual.
One final word on the weather, since the Meteorological Office insists upon providing it and This Author insists upon relaying it with appropriate feeling. Friday brings thundery showers across the Southern Kingdom and the Principality, brisk northerly winds, and temperatures that have not troubled 25 degrees anywhere in the Kingdom – the first such occurrence since the 29th of June. Rural parts of North Britain may fall to 3 or 4 degrees tonight. In August. This Author dons an extra shawl and notes, with the weary solidarity of the constitutionally damp, that sunshine is promised for the weekend. It is always promised for the weekend. We shall see.
I am, as ever, your most devoted observer – Lady Whistledown.