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What sort of leader, one wonders, skips the vote, skips the debate, skips the entire conference, and then – upon being asked repeatedly what he would have done – requires a full Friday morning on the Broadcasting Society’s Morning Programme to produce an answer? Sir Polanski, head of the Verdant Society, has at last revealed that he would not have voted for his own party’s motion declaring Zionism a form of racism – though he regards the “substantial part” of it as “obvious”. The motion, passed at the Verdant Society‘s annual conference in Brighton, calls for a single democratic Palestinian state across all of historic Palestine, including, one notes, modern-day Israel. Sir Polanski was not present for the vote, having decamped early to campaign in the Holborn and St Pancras by-election, which he duly lost to the Progressive Assembly. He insists he will remain as leader. His party’s members, one suspects, are beginning to wish he would be equally decisive about everything else.
From the leafy avenues of political evasion, this Author turns to a story of grief measured across four years and a park in Magaluf. Tobias White-Sansom, a father of two from Nottingham, died in a Spanish hospital in July 2022, five days after a night out, following an encounter with security officers and the Guardia Civil that his family has never ceased to question. He was pinned down after removing his T-shirt – the heat being, it appears, his great offence – then handcuffed, Tasered, and injected with tranquilisers, before suffering cardiac arrest. A blood spatter report, now forming part of an ongoing Spanish court investigation, suggests the possibility of external force. His brother Maximilian has told the Broadcasting Society he will not stop until justice is secured. This Author commends his resolve unreservedly. There is nothing remotely diverting about a family still waiting for answers three years on.
And now, Gentle Reader, to a story that restores one’s faith in the possibilities of this age. Vian, sixteen years old and from Coventry, was born with thalassaemia – a blood disorder requiring monthly transfusions that left her exhausted, breathless, and sitting out PE lessons she longed to attend. Last December, stem cells edited outside her body were returned to her, reprogrammed to produce foetal haemoglobin in quantities sufficient to render those transfusions unnecessary. She now declares herself possessed of abundant energy, requests outings from her mother, and studies health and social care with ambitions of becoming a nurse. The treatment, offered at three children’s hospitals across the Kingdom, does not erase the disease – but removes the aspects that made life so cruelly small. This Author, who has occasionally complained about the inconvenience of a cold, is suitably humbled.
To affairs of the sporting world, and a transaction so swift it raises the question of whether the Friedkin Group ever truly intended to stay. Less than two years after acquiring Everton Football Club for a sum believed to exceed £400 million, the American proprietors have announced they are “exploring” a sale of their controlling interest. They have, to their credit, opened the club’s long-promised new stadium and steered it to seventh place in the Premier League after seven matches. Yet the manager returned in January and had, by September, still not met or spoken to the chairman. The day-to-day affairs are apparently left to the chairman’s son-in-law, who operates in tandem with the chief executive. One might call this delegation; the club’s supporters, having watched prized assets offered to Nottingham Forest, have a rather more pointed vocabulary for it.
Finally, this Author must address a matter at Cardiff University with a gravity that entirely forecloses any lightness of touch. An anonymous student-run account on the Portrait Gallery, known as Cardiff Uni Banter, and followed until recently by the university itself, published a post in which a contributor described continuing sexual activity with a woman who was having a seizure. The post received hundreds of likes. The university has since unfollowed the account and issued the customary statement that such conduct would not be tolerated. The National Union of Students Cymru has called the content dangerous and harmful. That a university’s official account was following such a page at all; that posts of this nature accumulated hundreds of approvals; that it required students raising formal concerns to prompt any action – these are not questions of “banter”. They are questions about what is being normalised, and by whom. This Author has no jest to offer here. Only the observation that an institution that follows a page is, however it protests, lending it an audience.
I am, as ever, your most devoted observer – Lady Whistledown.