Skip to content
Four suspects in custody, a constable nursing a wound to his foot, and a nation of nearly one million young people doing precisely nothing productive with their days. This Author presents Monday’s ledger of woe without further preamble, for it requires none.
In the small hours of Sunday morning, a police officer of Nottinghamshire Constabulary approached two suspects on Angel Row in Nottingham and received, in return, a bullet in his foot. One does marvel at the audacity. Four persons have since been arrested – including a twenty-seven-year-old woman on suspicion of grievous bodily harm and possession of a firearm – the others on suspicion of assisting an offender. A thirty-year-old man was apprehended in Bedfordshire in the early hours of this very Monday, presumably having had adequate time to reflect upon his choices. The officer remains in hospital in a stable condition, which is the best news available from this entire affair, and his colleagues ask that his privacy be respected. This Author obliges, and wishes him a swift recovery.
From one emergency to another – though this one has been simmering rather longer. Dame Rachel de Souza, Children’s Commissioner for England, has published a report of such thoroughness that one suspects it took considerably longer to compile than anyone in government took to read it. Titled Childhood Lottery, it surveys one hundred different metrics and concludes, with commendable restraint, that children’s services across England are in a “state of emergency.” Over a million children were referred to mental health services in 2024-25. Fifty-five percent fail to achieve a good standard in English and mathematics at GCSE. Twelve percent of children do not feel safe in their local area. One group, Dame Rachel reports, described witnessing knife crime “virtually daily.” The postcode lottery she identifies is not merely unfair – it is, she writes, “a national emergency.” Lucy Powell, Education Secretary, assured the nation that no child shall be “held back by where they grow up.” This Author notes such assurances have been offered by successive governments since approximately the Reform Act, and yet here we are.
Lord Burnham, Prime Minister of this distressed Kingdom, has taken to the pages of The Times this Monday to declare youth unemployment “an economic catastrophe and a moral failure.” Almost one million people aged sixteen to twenty-four are currently not in education, employment, or training – the so-called Neets – of whom thirty-nine percent are unemployed and sixty-one percent are not even seeking work. The number of eighteen to twenty-four-year-olds claiming unemployment-related benefits stands at three hundred and thirty-one thousand, almost double the figure of 2016. Lord Burnham promises that “benefits will become the backstop, not the starting point,” and plans to announce job opportunities for young people this week. The Tories have called the strategy “a disaster,” which is the sort of criticism that lands with considerably less force when delivered by those who presided over half the problem. This Author observes that two simultaneous reports on children’s welfare appearing on the same Monday morning suggests either an extraordinary coincidence, or a communications team working very hard indeed.
From the gravely serious to the gravely expensive: data from the Grand Property Register reveals that home sellers in Britain cut asking prices on more than three thousand properties per day during September – the highest total for any month in fifteen years. The average reduction was nearly seven percent, or roughly twenty-one thousand pounds from a typically valued home. Homes that endure a price reduction then languish for an average of one hundred and nineteen days before finding a buyer, compared with thirty-nine days for those priced correctly from the outset. With mortgage rates at a three-year high, buyers are, apparently, being “choosy.” This Author considers that being asked to pay a fantasy sum for a semi-detached property in a commuter belt is less “buyers being choosy” and rather more “sellers being optimistic to a clinical degree.”
Finally, a dispatch from the Northern Province, where one hundred and sixty schools received an email claiming an explosive device had been placed within their walls. The Education Minister Paul Givan was swift to declare the threat “not viable,” which is the sort of reassurance that nevertheless prompts a great many parents to drive at speed to the school gates regardless. Some schools closed; others remained open; guidance from the authorities was described by one headteacher as “practically non-existent.” Lord Burnham’s government, having already declared the nation’s children in a state of emergency for want of proper services, will no doubt be relieved to hear that the explosive threat was at least fictional. The children, one imagines, found the whole episode rather more exciting than double mathematics. Whether they were reassured by it is another matter entirely.
I am, as ever, your most devoted observer – Lady Whistledown.