Skip to content
Breakfasting upon Tuesday’s intelligence, this Author paused mid-kedgeree to contemplate a singular truth: that the affairs of the Kingdom, when laid end to end, resemble nothing so much as a very long queue at a very understaffed counter. Reader, let us not keep you waiting.
Lord Burnham has crossed the Atlantic with his wife in tow, bound for New York and a face-to-face encounter with that most combustible of heads of state, Lord Trump. The Prime Minister assures us he has already established a “productive relationship” by telephone – which is, one supposes, rather like claiming to know a lion well because one has heard it roar twice through a closed door. He speaks of “common ground” and finding a “connection,” and this Author is delighted for him, whilst noting that the last several British statesmen who sought connections with Lord Trump emerged looking either very pleased with themselves or very crumpled. Lord Burnham will address the Assembly of World Sovereigns on the perils and promises of artificial intelligence, which, one cannot help observing, is rather like the village blacksmith delivering a lecture on electricity. Meanwhile, Sir Davey of the Liberal Democrat Society has declared the Prime Minister’s AI partnership plan woefully insufficient and called for a global pause on superintelligent AI – a proposal this Author finds entirely sensible, having already been frightened half to death by her own writing desk.
From transatlantic diplomacy to rather more domestic distress: Lord Healey, Chancellor of the Royal Exchequer, is discovering that the numbers in the ledger are doing precisely what numbers do when a nation spends more than it earns – namely, becoming larger and more alarming. Government borrowing in August reached £18.3 billion, a figure some £3.5 billion beyond what the Office of National Statistics had forecast and almost a fifth higher than the year prior. Debt interest alone consumed £8.8 billion – its highest August figure since records began in 1997, which is to say, since before many of his creditors were born. Lord Healey’s first Budget arrives at the end of October, and this Author suggests he may wish to take something fortifying before he reads it aloud.
On a note that is both grave and genuinely heartening, the National Health Society has announced the expansion of Martha’s Rule to every emergency department in Southern Kingdom. Named after young Martha Mills, who died aged thirteen in 2021 at King’s College after her family’s concerns about her deteriorating condition went unheard, the rule grants patients and their loved ones the right to call a dedicated number and demand an urgent clinical review. That such a rule needed inventing at all is, of course, the quiet scandal at the heart of this announcement. It speaks to a culture in which the worried relative standing at a bedside was too often treated as an inconvenience rather than an intelligence source. The expansion should reach every corner of the Southern Kingdom by March 2028, and North Britain has begun to adopt it too. Martha’s parents turned grief into policy. One trusts the institutions that failed her are paying attention.
This Author turns, with a sigh, to Lady Lindsay Foreman and Mr Craig Foreman, the British couple from East Sussex sentenced to ten years in Persian gaol on espionage charges they strenuously deny. They have now been detained for more than twenty months. Earlier this year, each conducted a hunger strike – lasting 93 and 84 days respectively, an endurance that humbles this Author, who struggles past teatime without a biscuit. They were promised family contact upon ending their strikes; that contact has not materialised with any reliability. Their family now seeks an urgent meeting with Foreign Secretary Lord Miliband, and a British consular visit is planned for the fifth of October – which will be, only the second such visit of the entire year. “Extremely concerning” is the family’s measured phrase for this. This Author, less given to restraint, would choose rather sharper words.
And finally, a matter of pressing concern to every household possessed of a cat with opinions or a dog with delicate knees: the Trades and Commerce Watchdog has this very Tuesday capped veterinary prescription fees at twenty-one pounds and decreed that vets must henceforth publish price lists, provide written estimates for treatments expected to cost five hundred pounds or more, and inform clients when cheaper medicines are available elsewhere. This follows an investigation finding that veterinary prices have been rising at nearly twice the rate of inflation – a discovery that will surprise approximately no one who has recently enquired about the cost of an X-ray for a Labrador. Critics warn the reforms will favour the six corporate groups that own more than two thirds of practices, at the expense of independents. Whether Fido’s bills shrink remains to be seen. This Author’s lorgnette, for one, will be trained upon the receipts.
I am, as ever, your most devoted observer – Lady Whistledown.