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Seven people died on the A66 near Middlesbrough in the small hours of Saturday morning. Two of them were PC Blades and PC Clough of the Cleveland Constabulary, aged thirty-seven and thirty-eight, who had gone to work and did not come home. The other five were in a Volkswagen Passat, travelling the wrong way, believed to be in their late teens to early twenties. There are no words in this column’s usual register adequate to the occasion, so This Author shall not reach for them. Seven lives. One road. The early hours of a Saturday. That is all.
Lord Burnham called it devastating. The Chief Constable called it unimaginable. The Office of Police Conduct has opened an investigation, as it must. Tributes have been laid near the scene. PC Blades and PC Clough are remembered as brave officers who protected their communities. This Author trusts the Cleveland Constabulary family, and the families of all seven, will find what comfort can be found. It is precious little, on a Sunday morning.
To lighter, though scarcely less vexing, matters. The government has announced that mayors across the Southern Kingdom are to receive new powers to overrule local councils on planning decisions – specifically on proposals involving more than a hundred and fifty homes, substantial commercial developments, or buildings exceeding thirty metres. Thirteen mayoral areas will gain the same authority long enjoyed by the Lord Mayor of the Capital, who may already “call in” any decision that displeases him. This Author notes, with only mild astonishment, that the Lord Mayor of the Capital has presided over a fall in housebuilding in recent years, and yet his powers are now held up as the model for the nation. The government calls it an essential toolkit. The Tories call it the removal of local democracy. Both, in This Author’s experience, may simultaneously be correct.
Meanwhile, the Energy Regulator is poised to announce, on Wednesday, that the energy price cap for October will reach a three-year high. Energy UK – the body representing the suppliers who send those increasingly alarming quarterly letters – has written to government to suggest that the £150 Warm Home Discount is insufficient for households in genuine crisis, and that a better-targeted social discount scheme is urgently required. Record debt levels of £4.7 billion owed to suppliers at the close of last winter rather support their point. The government has promised to cut VAT on electricity bills and to do “everything we can.” Given that the Persian war since February has sent wholesale energy prices upward, “everything we can” had better be rather a lot. This Author recommends, at minimum, a warm coat and managed expectations.
The Justice Secretary has announced that serious sexual and violent offenders leaving prison will, from October, be subject to “restriction zones” – GPS-monitored geographical boundaries tailored to each offender, breaches of which could see them promptly returned to gaol. This goes beyond the existing practice of exclusion zones, which merely ban offenders from specific addresses. The Tories, ever keen to remind us that the current government releases prisoners early, suggest emergency legislation would be preferable. The government suggests GPS tagging is the future. This Author, who has no particular wish to encounter violent offenders whilst shopping for ribbon, finds she supports the general direction of travel, whatever the specific vehicle.
And finally, a story that This Author finds simultaneously alarming and, she confesses in the privacy of this paragraph, rather compellingly absurd: hackers affiliated with the Persian regime have reportedly shut down a small power plant somewhere in the Kingdom for four days last month. The government is at pains to note it was a minor generator – not an essential service – and that the wider energy system was never at risk. The National Cyber Security Centre declines to say where the plant was, for security reasons, which is entirely sensible and also deeply unsatisfying. Four days, a small power station, Persian hackers, and this news reaches us only now – on a Sunday when the trains are also cancelled, the energy bills are about to rise, and seven people lie newly dead on a road in the north. This Author is going to make another pot of tea. It seems the prudent course of action.
I am, as ever, your most devoted observer – Lady Whistledown.