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Dearest Gentle Reader,
The body of a three-year-old child was discovered in a pond in Suffolk on Wednesday afternoon, and this Author sets down her pen for a moment before anything else is said. Little Noah Woods, not yet four years of age, had wandered from a playground in Brantham at three o’clock on Tuesday, and within hours some 1,300 souls had left their own lives to find him. They came from Birmingham, from Hampshire, from every direction the wind blows. Flowers now number a hundred bunches at the spot where he was last seen; a fundraiser for his family has gathered more than twenty-one thousand pounds. The community of Brantham did not wait to be asked. In a season that has not been short of reasons for despair, that is worth recording plainly, and without embellishment.
To rather less solemn matters, and yet one must not entirely abandon one’s lorgnette. The Palace has delivered what this Author can only describe as the most precisely worded slap in the history of royal correspondence. Earl Spencer, brother to the late Princess Diana, has written a memoir – Swan Song: Diana, My Sister – in which he alleges that His Majesty the King, in the raw days following the Princess’s death in 1997, remarked: “We’ll forget her soon enough.” The Palace has responded not with a denial, exactly, but with the observation that “the pain of fraternal grief can cloud reason, affect judgment and colour memory in ways others do not recognise, even many years after such a loss.” Readers of good memory will recognise the construction. It is, in spirit, a cousin to that immortal 2021 phrase – “recollections may vary” – deployed against the Duke of Sussex and Duchess of Sussex. The Palace, it seems, has found its preferred idiom for disputing the inconvenient: elegant, bloodless, and absolutely devastating.
All of this arrives on what was already a rather crowded day for the Royal Family, with His Majesty, the Prince of Wales, and the Princess of Wales attending engagements, and the Duke of Sussex making his first significant public appearance since returning to this Kingdom. One almost sympathises. Almost.
Meanwhile, at the Royal Treasury, the nine learned members of the Monetary Policy Committee have been sitting in grave deliberation, surrounded no doubt by alarming charts and cold tea, and are expected to hold the benchmark Bank rate at 3.75% for a sixth consecutive meeting. This would be reassuring, were it not for the context: inflation has crept upward to 3.1% in August, oil has sailed above one hundred dollars a barrel, and the conflict in the Middle East shows no sign of obliging anyone by resolving itself. Governor Lord Bailey has warned that if energy prices remain elevated, interest rates must rise further still. The Royal Treasury holds firm for now – but one senses it holds firm the way a man holds an umbrella in a gale: with determination, and diminishing confidence.
In rather more uplifting domestic news, a life-extending treatment for a specific and incurable form of breast cancer – known to the medical establishment as Enhertu, and to approximately one thousand women a year as something very close to hope – has at last been made available on the National Health Society in England. This follows two years of campaigning after the relevant body declared it insufficiently good value in 2024, a conclusion that will strike the thousand women per annum affected as a remarkable act of accounting. Lady Cooper, in her capacity as Health Secretary, pronounced the decision “life-changing.” Women in North Britain have had access since 2023. The Principality is expected to follow shortly. Progress, when it arrives, arrives unevenly – but on this Thursday, at least, it arrives.
And finally, a story that restores one’s faith in the fundamental decency of strangers. A woman in the Principality named Karen Davey, forty-one years of age, had already survived a heart attack at thirty-one and a subsequent heart transplant, only to find the very medication keeping her alive quietly ruining her kidneys. Friends and family could not donate. In desperation, she posted a plea on the digital salons, saying simply that she did not wish to leave her children without a mother. A gentleman named Gary Summerfield read the post, discovered he was a match, and announced to his family that “this lady needs one of my kidneys more than I need two of them.” Reader, he gave her one. The operation was performed in July. Mrs Davey reports feeling one hundred times better. This Author has spent the morning contemplating a world in which strangers on the internet do this sort of thing, and finds it considerably less terrible than usual.
I am, as ever, your most devoted observer – Lady Whistledown.