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Dearest Gentle Reader,
This Author confesses to a certain weary recognition upon surveying Wednesday’s dispatches: the country is, once again, being asked to pay more for everything while various gentlemen of consequence explain at length why none of it is their fault. How refreshingly consistent.
The Office of National Statistics has confirmed what every soul filling a motorcar already knew in their bones: inflation has climbed to 3.3% in the year to March, driven principally by the most alarming jump in petrol and diesel prices since June 2022. Motor fuel leapt a staggering 8.7% in a single month – one imagines the pump itself wincing. The culprit is the war in Persia, which has sent wholesale energy prices soaring since hostilities commenced on 28th February, disrupting the production and transportation of energy across the entire region. Economists now predict inflation may peak somewhere between 3.5% and 4% this year – comfortably above the Royal Treasury‘s target of 2%, though mercifully below the galloping double digits of 2022. Airfares and food prices joined the assault on one’s purse, with only the modest mercy of cheaper clothing to offer any consolation. This Author advises investing in a good coat and going nowhere.
Meanwhile, in the corridors of power, Lord Starmer has achieved the remarkable feat of sending what one senior union official calls “a real chill throughout the civil service” – in April, no less, when chills are supposed to be retreating. The occasion: the dismissal of the lead civil servant at the Foreign Office over the Lord Mandelson vetting fiasco, that endlessly diverting saga of whether a gentleman of certain prior associations ought to have been despatched as ambassador to the American Colonies. The head of the FDA trade union suggested that Lord Starmer is “losing the ability to work with the civil service” – a charge the Prime Minister batted away by praising civil servants’ integrity, which is precisely what one says when one has just dismissed their most senior representative. Lord Sedwill, former head of the civil service, has written to the papers demanding reinstatement and a retraction. This Author notes that the Prime Minister’s Residence has responded with the warmth of a draught under a poorly fitted door.
And now to a establishment of an altogether different sort. The new chief of McDonald’s in these islands, when pressed by the Broadcasting Society on allegations of a toxic workplace culture – allegations supported by the testimonies of over one hundred workers – responded with the memorable declaration: “I don’t want to talk about the past.” One can only admire the ambition of a strategy that consists principally of hoping everyone forgets. A former employee, less obligingly, observed that understanding what went wrong is rather essential to not doing it again – a logic so elementary it barely requires stating, and yet here we are. The company has introduced new training and accountability measures. Whether this constitutes a revolution or a pamphlet remains, as ever, to be seen.
On a note considerably more diverting, the Crown Health Security Agency has commenced a vaccine trial against the H5N1 bird flu strain – that industrious pathogen currently touring bird populations worldwide and making overtures to several mammals. Four thousand volunteers are being recruited, with priority given to those working in the poultry industry or aged over sixty-five. One volunteer from Hampshire, who has kept chickens for years, presented herself at a clinic in Southampton with admirable calm and received her dose without incident. This Author applauds her fortitude, and notes that, given the state of inflation, having one’s own chickens may soon be the most financially prudent decision in the Kingdom.
Finally, and most delightfully, a fossil hunter from Solihull travelling to Lyme Regis in Dorset seeking nothing more ambitious than a small ammonite has stumbled upon a fragment of the world’s oldest marine crocodile – one of only eleven such pieces ever found, from the Jurassic era. She mistook it for a piece of wood with nails driven through it. The guide’s response upon being shown it – “are you kidding me!” – strikes This Author as the most purely joyful exclamation reported anywhere this Wednesday. She donated it to Lyme Regis Museum and found her ammonite too. In a week of rising prices, chilled civil servants, and corporate amnesia, this is the outcome the Gentle Reader deserves: proof that occasionally, and against all odds, one goes looking for something small and comes home with something magnificent.
I am, as ever, your most devoted observer – Lady Whistledown.