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Four thousand. This Author set down her morning toast at the precise moment that figure arrived, and has not quite recovered her appetite since. The Great Carriage Works of the Midlands – that most storied of British motoring houses – is to shed four thousand souls from its payrolls over the next two years, in a bid to save a not inconsiderable £1.7 billion. The culprits, for those keeping score, are threefold: the relentless advance of the Celestial Empire’s carriage-makers, the punishing tariffs of Lord Trump across the American Colonies, and a cyber-attack last year that shuttered production for more than a month. One wonders, at times, whether the Kingdom’s great industrial names are not less navigating choppy waters than actively constructing the vessel from which they intend to leap.
Lady Reynolds, the Chief Treasury Secretary, conveyed her thoughts to the workforce on the Broadcasting Society‘s morning programme, which is precisely the sort of warm sentiment that keeps a laid-off engineer in coal through winter. One former German carriage giant director observed that the Great Carriage Works had been, to use his phrase, “somewhat late to the party” on electric vehicles – a party, one might add, to which they have now received the bill without having eaten the cake.
From affairs of industry to affairs of the heart – or rather, of the blood. This Author pauses here, for the news from the Broadcasting Society this Monday is one that commands genuine respect rather than a raised lorgnette. The esteemed presenter Lady Moshiri has revealed, with admirable courage, that she has been living with a rare blood cancer called polycythaemia vera since her diagnosis in November 2024. She has spent two years quietly managing the condition whilst continuing to deliver the news to the nation with her customary composure – a feat that rather puts the rest of us and our minor Monday grievances to shame. The disease, incurable but treatable, was caught only through the fastidiousness of her physician during routine blood tests; a reminder, if ever one were needed, that a diligent doctor is worth more than any number of fashionable tonics.
This Author turns now to a matter that admits of no levity whatsoever, and shall not attempt any. Zhenhao Zou – serving a life sentence with a minimum term of 24 years for drugging and raping ten women in the Capital and Celestial Empire between 2019 and 2023 – may now face further charges. The Metropolitan Constabulary has passed to prosecutors a file containing fresh allegations from seven additional women, five of whom came forward following a public appeal. A total of twenty-three women contacted the police after that appeal; that so many declined to pursue charges speaks volumes about a system that still asks a great deal of those who have already suffered most. The prosecuting authorities will now determine whether additional charges shall follow. This Author sincerely hopes they shall.
To the Northern Province, where the perpetual theatrical production known as the Stormont budget deadlock continues its run. Sir Chris Bryant has made his first visit to Stormont Castle as Secretary of State, conducting talks with the executive and the five largest parties in an effort to break an impasse so entrenched it has developed its own postal address. The executive cannot agree a budget without additional funds from the corridors of power; the corridors of power have not specified how much they are prepared to send. In the interim, Stormont officials have been granted legal authority to spend up to 95% of last year’s funding – which is, one supposes, the institutional equivalent of living on last season’s preserves and hoping no one notices. Lord Burnham has pledged to get things functioning properly, a pledge that joins a distinguished gallery of similar pledges stretching back further than This Author cares to recall.
And finally, a dispatch of pure delight to restore the spirits after so much grimness. Dorothea Bate – born in 1878, possessed of scant formal education, and blessed with an apparently inexhaustible appetite for crawling into remote Mediterranean caves – has at last received a blue plaque at the Natural History Museum in Hertfordshire. This palaeontologist, who taught herself the science, talked her way into a position at the museum in 1900, and subsequently discovered a previously unknown species of dwarf elephant in Cyprus and an extinct goat-like antelope in the Balearics, went on to publish more than eighty scientific papers – most of them without a permanent paid position to her name. If that is not a rebuke to every committee that has ever questioned the credentials of a self-taught woman, This Author does not know what is. The blue plaque is, one might venture, rather overdue by approximately a century.
I am, as ever, your most devoted observer – Lady Whistledown.