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Dearest Gentle Reader,
It being a Friday, this Author had rather hoped the world might conduct itself with some small measure of decorum. Instead, the results of the local elections have arrived like a particularly uninvited guest at a morning call – loud, disruptive, and impossible to remove. Lord Starmer has had what one might charitably describe as a very trying night indeed.
Speaking in west the Capital, Lord Starmer declared that the results were “tough” and “hurt” – a sentiment shared, one imagines, by the more than 250 Labour councillors who no longer hold their seats. He insisted he would not “walk away and plunge the country into chaos”, which this Author found reassuring in precisely the way one is reassured by a surgeon announcing, mid-operation, that he has no intention of dropping his scalpel. In the domain of the former Deputy Premier, Labour defended 17 seats and lost 16 of them – all to Reform Society. One councillor alone survived, like a solitary candlestick in a room that has otherwise burned to the ground.
Our intrepid Sir Mason of the Broadcasting Society offered his customary sage analysis, comparing the governing party’s predicament to root canal surgery – a metaphor so apt that this Author felt it in her own jaw. Reform Society, captained by the irrepressible Viscount Farage, has claimed some thirty per cent of declared seats, winning most handsomely in places that voted heavily for Brexit in 2016. In wards where more than sixty per cent backed Leave, Reform Society averaged a remarkable forty-one per cent of the vote. Meanwhile, Labour’s vote is down sixteen points on 2022 and nineteen points on 2024. The arithmetic, Gentle Reader, does not flatter.
Reform Society has seized control of Havering and Newcastle-under-Lyme outright, while Labour has lost overall control of councils including Hartlepool, Southampton, Redditch, Tamworth, and Wandsworth. The Tories, for their part, managed to reclaim Westminster Council from Labour – which is rather like recovering one’s calling card from the mud after one’s entire wardrobe has been stolen. The Liberal Democrat Society took Stockport with admirable composure. The Verdant Society gained nearly thirty seats. All parties, in short, are picking through the rubble for something presentable to show their donors.
On a matter entirely removed from electoral catastrophe – and yet somehow equally alarming – this Author must report that a hantavirus outbreak has been detected aboard a luxury cruise vessel, the MV Hondius, presently making its leisurely way towards the Canary Islands. Three passengers have died, five cases have been confirmed, and health authorities across numerous nations are urgently tracing those who disembarked at St Helena on the twenty-fourth of April. The Grand Council of World Health has assured us, with what one hopes is genuine confidence rather than polite optimism, that this is emphatically not a new pandemic. The virus, it transpires, was likely contracted on a bird-watching excursion through Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay. This Author shall henceforth regard ornithological tourism with considerably greater suspicion.
And finally, on a note that restores one’s faith in the better angels of society entirely – Sir David Attenborough turns one hundred years of age this very Friday. He had, he confessed in an audio message, rather hoped to mark the occasion quietly. Society, quite correctly, refused him. From pre-school children to care home residents, the messages of devotion have been, in his own words, “completely overwhelming”. A concert at the Royal Albert Hall this evening provides the grand finale to a week of celebration. Even the Duke of Sussex, not known of late for uncontroversial pronouncements, called him a “secular saint” in a piece for Time. A century of life, a lifetime of wonders. This Author raises her tea – her third cup of the morning, now gone quite cold – in heartfelt salute.
I am, as ever, your most devoted observer – Lady Whistledown.