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Thirty-five billion pounds. This Author sets that figure before you quite plainly, for it is the sort of number that ought to arrest a person mid-breakfast and keep them from their kedgeree for the remainder of the morning. It is, according to the learned minds at the Institute for Fiscal Studies, the approximate sum that Lord Healey must conjure from somewhere – the sofa cushions of the Royal Exchequer, perhaps, or the good faith of suffering taxpayers – if his Budget on the 28th of this month is to be anything more than an elaborate work of fiction. Defence at three per cent of national income, health spending upheld, and departments not quietly throttled: these ambitions, we are told, cannot all coexist without either dramatic tax rises or cuts that nobody in the Grand Assembly has the courage to name aloud. The Royal Exchequer declined to comment. Of course it did.
Meanwhile, Lord Burnham has been enjoying a characteristically eventful Monday morning, informing the nation via podcast that Muscovy did indeed interfere with the Brexit referendum of 2016, that he was told so upon arriving at The Prime Minister’s Residence, and that he considers further silence on the matter to be something very close to cowardice. One cannot help noticing the timing: Lord Burnham is simultaneously preparing to address the Grand Assembly this very afternoon on the virtues of closer ties with the Continental Alliance, calling it a “dereliction of duty” to decline any deal that Brussels might offer. That Muscovy‘s alleged meddling should emerge on the same morning he makes his case for rapprochement with the Continental Alliance is, one is sure, entirely coincidental. Lady Badenoch has already sharpened her correspondence to a fine point on this subject, and one expects her reply to be brisk.
For those who voted Leave and now find themselves accused of having been unwitting agents of Lord Putin‘s grand design, a pro-Brexit group has called the suggestion “insulting.” This Author offers no verdict – only the observation that when a Prime Minister announces both foreign interference and a summit with the Continental Alliance on the same Monday, the political calendar has been arranged with considerable intention.
To Yorkshire Wildlife Park, near Doncaster, which enters its third day of closure following an incident on Saturday afternoon that this Author can only describe as a tragedy of the most harrowing kind. A man entered the enclosure of Altai, a rare Amur tiger, and did not survive the encounter. The park remains shuttered, the tiger remains in its enclosure and unharmed, and South Yorkshire’s constabulary has asked, with considerable reasonableness, that people refrain from sharing the footage that has been circulating through the digital salons. Flowers have been laid at the gates. This Author says no more on the matter than the facts require, save to note that the gulf between what draws a person to such a place and what awaits them there is a subject for minds wiser than this one.
Viscount Farage and the Reform Society have, with the enthusiasm of persons who have never been troubled by legal nuance, announced their intention to suspend the entire asylum system for a full parliamentary term – five years – should they ever find themselves in government. All current applications voided, ninety thousand people with appeal cases marked for deportation, withdrawal from the European Convention on Human Rights, repeal of the Human Rights Act, and visa bans upon six named countries if they decline to accept deportation flights. The Progressive Assembly called it “desperation and weakness.” The Reform Society called it a “functioning border.” This Author calls it a manifesto that has consulted rather fewer lawyers than it has tabloid editors. Whether any of it is achievable, or even lawful, appears to be a question for a future parliament to untangle – at leisure.
Finally, a word on the matter of rooftops, which Citizens Advice informs us have become the frontline of domestic villainy. One in ten of all scams brought to the charity this past year concerned roofing: nine thousand complaints in the year to August, of which more than two thousand were suspected fraud. Rogues knock upon doors, pronounce roofs to be in imminent peril, collect thousands of pounds, and vanish, leaving behind dislodged bricks, blocked gutters, and in at least one case a chimney so comprehensively stripped that the neighbour’s attic received rather more of the weather than was strictly desired. Citizens Advice counsels thorough checks before engaging any tradesman. This Author counsels one to look upward with fresh suspicion – not only at one’s roof, but at anyone who arrives uninvited to discuss it.
I am, as ever, your most devoted observer – Lady Whistledown.