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Dearest Gentle Reader,
One begins this Saturday with a question that has confounded greater minds than this Author’s: how does a nation apologise for something its living citizens did not personally commit, whilst simultaneously declining to pay for it? Lord Burnham has apparently found the answer, and it involves the word “dialogue” deployed with considerable frequency.
The Prime Minister declared this Saturday that the transatlantic slave trade was a “brutal and barbaric violation” – a verdict with which no reasonable person could quarrel – and announced he is “open” to a formal apology on behalf of the British state. Open, that is, whilst being firmly closed to reparations. This Author pictures a great door, flung wide with theatrical flourish, behind which stands nothing but a very expensive consultation. The timing is exquisite: His Majesty the King is presently touring the Caribbean, having made reference to “the suffering of the past” in the Bahamas before visiting the site of an enslaved people’s rebellion in Guyana. The King tours; the Prime Minister writes op-eds. Governance, one supposes, takes many forms.
To the rather more immediately gripping matter of Broadcasting Society One’s Celebrity Traitors, which reached its climax on Friday to the breathless attention of some fifteen million souls – a number that suggests the Kingdom has entirely abandoned any pretence of productivity on a Friday evening. After four weeks of suspicion and thoroughly suspect tactics, the faithful duo of comedian Romesh Ranganathan and Heartstopper actor Sebastian Croft emerged victorious, sharing an £83,000 prize for their respective charities. The vanquished traitors were Love Island’s Maya Jama and a gentleman known as YouTuber King Kenny, whose consolation prize is, apparently, having become a mainstream star through the act of spectacular public defeat. James Blunt survived to the very end, which this Author considers either vindicating or deeply suspicious, and declines to decide which. Host Claudia Winkleman presided over proceedings with her customary air of someone who knows considerably more than she is letting on – a quality this Author naturally admires.
From theatrical treachery to bureaucratic treachery, which is a rather less entertaining variety. Lady Mahmood of the Office of Home Affairs is expected next week to announce her revised immigration settlement rules – revised, notably, after Lady Rayner described the original proposals as “un-British”, a charge that stung sufficiently to prompt a rethink. The original plan: extend the wait for permanent settlement from five years to ten, with lower-paid workers facing fifteen. The revised plan: social care workers already in the Kingdom are likely to be exempt, whilst most others face a decade’s wait. Two hundred thousand consultation responses arrived at the Office of Home Affairs. This Author imagines the civil servants involved require a prolonged lie-down.
In rather more welcome news, the Meteorological Office reports that the Kingdom may enjoy up to ten consecutive dry days, following what the Crown Environmental Officers have confirmed was England’s wettest week in two years, courtesy of Storms Austen and Boelo. Ten dry days! The nation, sodden and resentful, can scarcely believe its luck. Halloween this very Saturday evening should remain largely dry for most, though the Western Isles of Scotland may receive some additional dampening – which this Author suspects those of a supernatural disposition will consider appropriately atmospheric. Fog is promised in abundance each morning, which will at least provide dramatic effect for those who find dry weather insufficiently gothic.
Finally, and this Author saves him for last because he deserves the position of honour, there is the matter of Karl Bushby – former paratrooper, now aged fifty-seven, who set out from Punta Arenas in Chile in 1998 to walk home to Hull. Twenty-eight years. Thirty-six thousand miles. Across four continents, through the Darién Gap, over the frozen Bering Strait, and – just weeks ago – swimming the English Channel. He imposed upon himself two rules: no transport to advance his progress, and no return to the Kingdom until the journey was complete. This Author, who considers it a considerable achievement to make it to the lending library without incident, is lost for adequate mockery. When this correspondent met him in rural Lincolnshire, his handcart – christened “The Beast” – suffered a puncture, which Bushby repaired with the equanimity of a man for whom jungles are a commute. At journey’s end, he will meet a twelve-year-old granddaughter he has never yet laid eyes upon. Some arrivals, Gentle Reader, transcend the gossip column entirely.
I am, as ever, your most devoted observer – Lady Whistledown.