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Dearest Gentle Reader,
This Author set down her breakfast this Thursday morning, glanced at the dispatches spread across the table, and arrived at a verdict before reading a single word: the Kingdom is, once again, doing its very utmost to be ungovernable. The month draws near its close and yet the scandals show no sign of observing any such calendar. Pray, read on.
First, to a matter that demands the gravest of our attentions, leavened only by the fury it deserves. The Northern Trust of Durham and Darlington has agreed to review up to a further 4,500 breast cancer cases, following a prior inquiry that found some 321 women out of 538 reviewed had suffered harm – including, it must be said, one death – owing to delayed diagnoses and unnecessary surgical procedures stretching back to 2015. The board’s chair offered what was described as a “sincere” apology, and acknowledged she could not “turn back the clock.” She cannot indeed. The women affected used rather stronger language. One described herself as feeling “mutilated.” Another called the failings “absolutely unforgivable.” This Author records these words not for dramatic effect but because they are the precise and honest words of women who deserved better, and we should not soften them with our ornamental prose.
From Durham we travel to Lancashire, where residents of Thornton-Cleveleys have received blood test results of a most unwelcome sort. “Ridiculously off the scale,” said one resident – and she was not reviewing a restaurant. She was describing the levels of PFOA, a cancer-causing forever chemical, found in her family’s blood, linked by the Crown Environmental Officers to the nearby AGC Chemicals works, which manufactured non-stick frying pan coating using the substance until 2012. The irony, Gentle Reader, that the very substance designed to ensure nothing sticks to one’s cookware has now stuck, indelibly and permanently, to the bodies of those who lived nearby, is the sort of grim joke that the universe tells without a trace of humour. PFOA has been banned since 2020. The factory has long since stopped. The chemical, true to its name, has not gone anywhere whatsoever.
Now to the English Channel, where a certain Daniel Thomas – known to his admirers as Danny Tommo, which is exactly the sort of name that explains everything – was this week arrested by Hampshire and Isle of Wight Constabulary after a video appeared to show him slashing at a migrant vessel with a knife. A French coastguard official was aboard the boat at the time. The fifty migrants who had sailed from Normandy had already been safely taken to Dover. Thomas now faces suspicion of criminal damage with intent to endanger life, destroying ships, and conduct endangering ships. Far-right activist Tommy Robinson rushed to share footage of the arrest on the digital salons, framing it as heroism. This Author would offer a more precise word, but the courts shall provide one in due course.
Moving from villainy to vocations, Lord Burnham‘s government has unveiled plans for new vocational GCSEs, to be introduced from 2029 for fourteen-year-olds across the Southern Kingdom. Building and construction, business management, child development – all to be offered alongside existing academic subjects, with some 200,000 work experience opportunities pledged for the under-sixteens. Lucy Powell, the Education Secretary, declared this would give young people a “stronger connection” to careers. The Tories declared it risked “throwing away” progress. The examination regulator will set national standards. Whether any of this produces a generation of confident young tradespeople, or merely a generation of teenagers bewildered by yet another qualification acronym, only 2029 shall reveal.
Finally, this Author cannot let pass the week’s most quietly comic policy proposal, delivered by Lady Badenoch‘s Tories with the breathless confidence of people who have just invented the wheel and are not yet aware the wheel exists. Their scheme: a “Back to Work” pre-paid card for long-term benefit claimants, which would block spending on alcohol, cigarettes, and gambling. The card would carry a 30% reduction to Universal Credit for those deemed capable of work after six months. The Progressive Assembly called it “unworkable.” This Author merely observes that the party proposing to police the shopping habits of the unemployed had fourteen years in which to reform the welfare system and apparently preferred to leave that task for a Thursday press release in opposition. The audacity is, one must concede, entirely consistent.
I am, as ever, your most devoted observer – Lady Whistledown.