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The most powerful statement made by any woman this Friday was not delivered in speech, nor in pamphlet, nor in any of the digital salons where the ton conducts its loudest quarrels. It was delivered in black silk, at a party in 1994, by a princess who had just watched her husband confess his infidelities to the entire Kingdom on the evening’s entertainment. This Author speaks, of course, of the so-called revenge dress – a strapless creation by the Greek designer Christina Stambolian – which Princess Diana wore to the Serpentine Gallery whilst the then-Prince of Wales was busy on the other channel admitting to everything. The dress is now to be auctioned at Sotheby’s on 9 December, with an estimate of up to £220,000. Fashion as diplomacy. Fashion as indictment. Fashion as a very elegant two-fingered salute. One rather suspects the dress will fetch considerably more.
To weightier matters, and those of the Grand Assembly. This Friday, MPs are once again asked to vote upon the vexed question of assisted dying in the Southern Kingdom and the Principality – a proposal that would permit adults with fewer than six months to live to apply for help to end their lives, subject to safeguards including the approval of two doctors and an expert panel. The bill’s sponsor, Lady Hardy, says there is a “real human cost to the delay,” and she is not speaking in abstractions. The most eloquent voice in this debate belongs to Dame Esther Rantzen, 86, who is terminally ill with stage four lung cancer and who had joined the Dignitas clinic in Switzerland in the hope of exercising a choice. That choice, she has now revealed, has been stolen from her by the cruelest of timing: when she was strong enough to travel, her life was not yet unbearable; by the time it became unbearable, she was too physically fragile to make the journey. The law she describes as “messy and cruel” has left her precisely where she prayed she would not be.
The bill passed the Commons earlier this year, then stalled in the Upper Chamber, where peers tabled more than 1,200 amendments – a number that suggests either magnificent diligence or a very determined desire to run out the clock. Lady Hardy now asks MPs to pass an identical bill, which would limit the Lords’ power to halt it entirely. One notes, with a raised brow, that it is Friday, the day when serious business is traditionally avoided in the Grand Assembly. Today, it seems, serious business has declined to take the hint.
From one silenced woman to another – though in the second case, the silence lasted twenty-eight years. A gentleman by the name of Trevor Dunkley, aged 66, appeared at Wolverhampton Crown Court this Friday and pleaded guilty to the murder of Patricia Lashley, a mother of seven who was last seen near her home in Dudley in September 1998. The court was informed that Miss Lashley’s body was placed in a cellar and has never been recovered. There is no wit to be wrung from this. There is only the particular horror of a family who made a fresh appeal to trace their mother as recently as 2017, still not knowing, and a justice system that has taken nearly three decades to deliver a guilty plea. Mr Dunkley will be sentenced on 6 November. The seven children of Patricia Lashley have waited long enough.
Finally, to the West Midlands once more, where nineteen families in Stourbridge lost their homes on the hottest day of the year when two fires tore through dry grass and into their estate on 13 August. Among them are Sandy and Uttam Shiralkar, who have spent the past month living from their car boot, moving between the hospitality of friends and a local hotel – what Mr Shiralkar himself describes, with a composure this Author finds quietly astonishing, as a “nomadic tribe.” They had lived in their house for nineteen years. The photographs they cannot replace, the memories they cannot share with grandchildren, the rebuilding process that will take up to two years: these are the quiet devastations that do not make for grand parliamentary speeches. They simply are. This Author trusts the Kingdom is paying attention.
I am, as ever, your most devoted observer – Lady Whistledown.