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Dearest Gentle Reader,
This Author confesses to a particular suspicion about Mondays – they invariably arrive with more drama than the entire preceding week could muster, and with the month barely four days old, this particular Monday has wasted not a single moment in proving the point.
Lord Starmer has swept into Yerevan, Armenia, for the Grand Continental Assembly, declaring that the Kingdom‘s participation in a £78 billion Continental Alliance loan scheme to support Ukraine against Muscovy will be “very good” for – well, practically everything, by his accounting. Very good for Ukraine, very good for the Kingdom, very good for relations with the Continental Alliance. One wonders if Lord Starmer has yet discovered something it is not very good for, though this Author suspects he is still searching. He did find time, amid all this relentless optimism, to meet Lord Zelensky, who requested that warm regards be conveyed to His Majesty the King for his “strong words” during the recent American state visit. Strong words, a £78 billion loan, and a summit in Armenia – it being a Monday, naturally.
From the corridors of power to the corridors of medicine – and here, Gentle Reader, This Author brings genuinely cheerful intelligence. The National Health Society has approved an injectable form of Keytruda, the world’s best-selling cancer drug, which reduces treatment time from over an hour of drip infusion to – marvel of marvels – a single minute. One minute. Fourteen types of cancer, approximately 14,000 patients a year in the Southern Kingdom alone, and the whole affair concluded before one’s tea goes cold. An 86-year-old patient from Hertfordshire declared she now has more time for gardening. If that is not civilisation advancing at precisely the correct pace, This Author does not know what is.
Now to a story that demands this Author set down all irony for a moment. On Wednesday last, in Golders Green in the Capital, a 76-year-old Jewish gentleman named Moshe Shine was subjected to a knife attack at a bus stop – a cowardly and hateful act that leaves this Author cold with indignation. Yet from that darkness emerged a figure of quite extraordinary courage: one Ashkan Asadian, aged 61, who witnessed the attack, threw himself between the assailant and his victim, grappled with a man holding a knife, discovered afterwards that his own hoodie had been cut – and felt, he says, not fear, but simply the compulsion to “save someone’s life.” He subsequently barricaded the fleeing attacker inside a greengrocer’s with a shopping trolley – which is, when one considers it, the most magnificently practical act of heroism this column has ever had occasion to record. Mr Shine has since been discharged from hospital. Asadian deserves a medal, or at the very least, a very fine dinner.
To rather more domestic – if rather more violent – domestic affairs. A “suspicious explosion” in Frenchay, Bristol, on Sunday morning left two people dead and three injured, with the Avon and Somerset Constabulary and the British Army’s Explosive Ordnance Disposal both in attendance. Residents were temporarily evacuated to a Harvester restaurant and then a social club, which This Author imagines was not the bank holiday Sunday any of them had anticipated. Police have confirmed they are not seeking anyone else in connection with the incident, describe it as “complex and sensitive,” and continue their investigation behind a forensics tent. The question of what caused the explosion remains, at time of publication, unanswered – which is precisely the sort of unresolved intrigue that keeps This Author’s quill perpetually dipped.
And finally, the Palace has delivered the season’s most delightful announcement: Princess Eugenie and her husband Jack Brooksbank are expecting their third child, due this summer. His Majesty the King is, we are told, “delighted.” Young August, aged five, and Ernest, aged two, are “very excited” – though This Author suspects Ernest’s understanding of the situation may be largely theoretical. The new arrival will be fifteenth in line to the throne, displacing the Duke of Edinburgh, and will notably not carry an HRH – a distinction that matters rather less, one imagines, when one is a baby. The announcement was made on the Portrait Gallery, because it is the year 2026 and even royal heirs are heralded via digital salons. Mr Brooksbank, for his part, celebrated his fortieth birthday on Sunday – making this quite the most eventful bank holiday weekend the family has enjoyed in some time.
I am, as ever, your most devoted observer – Lady Whistledown.