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The details of this Wednesday’s news arrived in a particular order, and This Author read them in silence, the morning’s tea growing quite cold beside her. The first item was enough to stop one’s hand mid-pour. A newborn baby girl, found stabbed to death at a house in Sheffield. Four adults now charged with murder, with causing or allowing the death of a child, and with perverting the course of justice by taking steps to conceal the killing of an infant. A fifth person, a girl of fifteen, charged with perverting the course of justice. Five individuals. One infant. This Author has no quip for this, and will not contrive one. She records it, as she must, and trusts that justice follows swiftly.
To the Grand Assembly, then, where Lord Burnham addressed Members for the first time as Prime Minister, and delivered himself of the observation that “Britain is not where any of us would wish it to be.” A thundering understatement, one feels, on a day when the yield on a thirty-year gilt rose to 5.89 per cent, its highest since 1998 – a full twenty-eight-year high. The Royal Exchequer‘s self-imposed fiscal rules, inherited from the previous Chancellor Lady Reeves, now squeeze Lord Healey‘s Budget ambitions most inconveniently. Meanwhile, Lady Badenoch, leading the Tories, informed the House that Lord Burnham was “living in the past.” This Author notes that the past – specifically, 1998 – has come roaring back quite uninvited, in the form of borrowing costs, so perhaps Lady Badenoch has a point.
From the corridors of fiscal despair, This Author is compelled to turn to the corridors of our hospital emergency departments, which are evidently now receiving children as young as six in mental health crisis. The National Health Society England‘s own figures reveal 75,491 such attendances in 2025, up thirty-six per cent from 2019. More than six thousand of those children waited over twelve hours once they arrived. Six years old. Twelve hours. In a room designed for broken bones and burst appendixes. The government says it is “looking to improve services and would be setting out plans soon.” This Author has no doubt the plans will arrive. She merely wonders whether they will arrive before the next six-year-old does.
Now, Gentle Reader, permit This Author a moment of genuine theatrical pleasure. The Lord Mayor of the Capital has been convicted in absentia and fined £220 for failing to tax a 2002 Nissan Micra, a vehicle he insists he does not own. The licensing authority‘s correspondence was, charmingly, sent to a Gordon Ramsay restaurant in east London rather than to the relevant transport offices. The conviction arose, it seems, from a wave of motorists who, incensed by the expanded low-emission zone, registered their vehicles in the Mayor’s name to make him liable for the daily charge. It is a prank of considerable civic ingenuity, and This Author, though she condemns lawbreaking in all its forms, cannot suppress the faintest smile at the vision of the Lord Mayor of the Capital being held accountable for a twenty-four-year-old hatchback he has never sat in. The case, we are told, is being “urgently” reviewed. One imagines the Micra is not.
Finally, a dispatch from the Principality that is equal parts farcical and genuinely troubling. Women going through the menopause have, we learn, been posing as men in order to purchase testosterone from online pharmacies, because obtaining a proper prescription through the National Health Society in Wales has proved so fraught. A specialist consultant reports patients presenting with testosterone levels up to twelve times the safe threshold, risking permanent side effects. The Welsh government has responded that all health boards are expected to provide “individualised care,” which is the precise sort of answer that explains, in three words, why women have resorted to posing as men to obtain medication on the internet. This Author does not know whether to direct her lorgnette at the system’s absurdity or its cruelty. Perhaps both.
I am, as ever, your most devoted observer – Lady Whistledown.