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Dearest Gentle Reader,
Picture, if you will, a cake. Not a particularly appetising one – more the sort served at a banker’s quarterly review, garnished with redundancy notices and algorithmic frosting. The Grand Banking House of the Eagle has announced it is relieving some five thousand souls of their professional obligations, the better to install what its chief executive cheerfully describes as “the icing on the cake” – namely, artificial intelligence. One thousand posts already gone; four thousand more to follow before the year is out. This constitutes approximately five percent of the bank’s global workforce, and This Author cannot help but note that the institution made £2.3 billion in profit in the three months to September alone. The cake, it would seem, is thriving. It is only the bakers who are being shown the door.
Meanwhile, from the frozen extremities of the realm comes news that ought to concentrate the mind rather sharply. A report by members of the Grand Assembly’s Committee on Defence warns that the Kingdom possesses “glaring gaps” in its capacity to defend the Arctic region against Muscovy. There is, we are told, a “shockingly low availability” of submarines, and a temporary loss of the ability to operate them beneath Arctic ice altogether. Muscovy, one notes, suffers from no such modesty of ambition, its submarines lurking at Cold War levels in the North Atlantic, using the ice as a rather elegant hiding screen. The War Office has assured the public it is “clear-eyed about the threat” – which is, This Author supposes, a beginning, though one might wish for rather more than clear eyes and rather fewer glaring gaps.
To science, and to something genuinely hopeful amidst the Thursday gloom. A clinical trial called AD-SMART has been launched in these shores, testing two repurposed medicines – one ordinarily deployed against type 2 diabetes, the other against ADHD – upon patients with Alzheimer’s disease. The study will run multiple treatments simultaneously, which the medical fraternity consider rather efficient. The first participant is Angela Bucksey, sixty-seven, of Cambridgeshire, who declared she would “fight back” rather than sit and be defined by her diagnosis. Lord Burnham, whose father died from Alzheimer’s last month, offered his support with evident sincerity. Alzheimer’s afflicts around six hundred thousand people in this Kingdom, and if two drugs already sitting on a pharmacist’s shelf prove useful in combatting it, This Author shall regard that as the most welcome news of the season.
Now to a matter of justice, and of the peculiar power wielded by those who simply refuse to show up. The War Office for Justice has proposed that offenders who decline to attend their own sentencing hearings may, from next year, face the loss of prison visits, confinement to their cells for up to three weeks, and various other revocations of privilege. This follows the existing provision – apparently insufficient – of a fine or two additional years’ imprisonment. The impetus, in no small part, comes from Farah Naz, whose niece, the aspiring lawyer Zara Aleena, was murdered in east London in June 2022. Her killer remained in his cell while his sentence was read aloud to an empty chair. “A year or two added to a life sentence wouldn’t make any difference to an offender,” Naz observed, with the calm precision of someone who has had far too long to think about it. She is not wrong.
Finally, This Author sets down her quill a moment in something approaching reverence. Dame Judi Dench, ninety-one years old and seven decades into a career that has encompassed Shakespeare, Bond, and everything in between, has disclosed to the Broadcasting Society’s Morning Programme that her age-related macular degeneration has rendered her unable to perform on stage, unable to work on film, and unable to read. “I can’t be on stage. I can’t do a play any more. I can’t do a film any more. I can’t read any more,” she said, without apparent self-pity. She has, she notes, taken occasionally to embracing entirely the wrong strangers. When asked what she found to recommend about ageing, she replied: “There’s nothing to say for it at all.” A memoir is forthcoming, composed alongside a theatre director, since she cannot read it herself. If that is not a description of indomitable spirit rendered in miniature, This Author does not know what is.
I am, as ever, your most devoted observer – Lady Whistledown.