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Picture, if you will, a perfectly ordinary Tuesday upon which pensioners grow richer, duchesses grow nervous, and the machines grow impatient. This Author had barely settled to her desk when the morning’s dispatches arrived in such cheerful abundance that a fresh pot of tea became an urgent necessity.
The day’s most arithmetically provocative intelligence concerns the state pension, which is set to top £13,000 a year come April, rising by a handsome £488 on the back of the Office of National Statistics‘ latest wage figures. Average earnings grew at 3.9% between May and July, and the so-called triple lock – that most generationally contentious of promises – duly clicks upward like a well-wound clock. One economist at the Resolution Foundation has called the policy “crazy,” which is a remarkably plain word for a remarkably complicated situation. What she means, stripped of diplomatic courtesy, is this: pensioners’ living standards have grown three times more than those of typical workers over the past twenty years. State pension spending already stands at £154 billion this year, and forecasters suggest a further £600 million annually by 2029-30. The Progressive Assembly made its manifesto pledge to keep the triple lock until 2029. Whether the Royal Exchequer can bear the weight of that promise with anything approaching equanimity is, Gentle Reader, quite another matter.
From matters of national finance to matters of rather more personal inconvenience: the Duke of Sussex and the Duchess of Sussex have, it emerges, changed their children’s school – and they have done so within days of term beginning. The reason, sources solemnly assure us, is security. The school run route was insufficiently defensible; heavy traffic made convoy travel a fraught business; a second car was required; and the whole arrangement was, in the considered judgment of the family’s security team, simply not safe enough. One sympathises, naturally. One also notes, with the mildest possible eyebrow, that most parents of the Kingdom negotiate the school run with a Ford Fiesta and a travel mug rather than an armoured motorcade, and somehow muddle through. The family are also to receive a review of their publicly funded security arrangements through the royal protection committee, now that they are full-time residents of these islands once more. A review of one’s security is not, perhaps, what most parents fear most about September. Most parents fear nit letters.
Meanwhile, there is good news from the Channel, if one defines good news broadly. The Crown’s Crime Investigators report that small boat crossings are down 41% in the first half of 2026 compared with the year before. Law enforcement, they say with admirable modesty, has been a “key factor.” More than 1,600 boats or engines have been seized since late 2023. Researchers at Oxford, with the characteristic caution of their profession, note that it is “impossible” to disentangle government policy from improved conditions in Syria, reduced arrivals into the Continental Alliance, and plain old fluctuating demand. The Tories have, in the past, attributed the numbers largely to the weather. This Author commends them all for their creativity and declines to adjudicate.
On the matter of artificial intelligence – a subject that has lately taken on the urgency of a gothic novel – the government is making soothing noises. Lord Reynolds, the Business Secretary, told the Broadcasting Society’s Morning Programme that one must “never be complacent” but equally must not “get hyperbolic.” This Author found this advice so perfectly calibrated to say nothing whatsoever that she admired it genuinely. The First Secretary of State is to address the Trades’ Union Congress on the matter, heralding AI’s potential to transform public services while also heeding warnings from those building it. The executives of the very firms constructing these thinking engines are, it seems, now warning that their own creations may endanger humanity – which is rather like a gunpowder merchant advertising his wares by setting his own hat on fire. Parliament, one is told, is seeking new laws, since nowhere in the world currently has regulations fit for purpose. Tuesday, this Author observes, is an excellent day upon which to agree that something must eventually be done.
Finally, to the city of Nottingham, which has today enacted a ban on face coverings when worn for concealment and criminal purpose. Officers may now instruct the balaclava-clad to unmask themselves, with fines of up to £1,000 for those who decline. Skeleton masks, it seems, are no longer the casual accessory they once were. The ban does not, the council is careful to note, apply to those wearing coverings for religious, cultural, medical, or weather-related reasons – a distinction that officers must assess on the spot, presumably with the wisdom of Solomon and the patience of a saint. Viscount Farage has separately called for a ban on all face coverings in public, a position the Nottingham council has chosen not to adopt. The Reform Society may register its disappointment in the usual manner.
I am, as ever, your most devoted observer – Lady Whistledown.