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One does not, as a rule, expect May to behave like the outer circles of perdition. And yet here we are, Gentle Reader – Tuesday, and Southern Kingdom is apparently auditioning to become the Mediterranean. Kew Gardens recorded 34.8C on Monday, surpassing every May temperature this Kingdom has ever had the misfortune to endure, and forecasters warn today may be warmer still, with 35C possible across the south-east. The Meteorological Office notes, with admirable understatement, that “this heat would be exceptional in the UK even in mid-summer, let alone in May.” This Author notes, with rather less understatement, that the Kingdom is on fire and everyone is cheerfully blaming the atmosphere.
But the heat that delights the picnickers has proved murderous at the water’s edge. Three teenagers lost their lives on Bank Holiday Monday – a thirteen-year-old boy at Leadbeater Dam in Halifax, a teenage girl at Kingsbury Water Park in Warwickshire, and a teenage boy at Rother Valley Country Park in Rotherham. A fifteen-year-old boy had drowned near Lincoln the day before. Four young lives, extinguished at beauty spots in the span of two days. This Author sets down her pen for a moment and finds no wit whatsoever to apply here – only the earnest plea that any reader who loves a young person remind them: open water in a heatwave is not a lark. It is a danger that does not negotiate. The Crown Health Security Agency has issued amber and yellow alerts covering most of Southern Kingdom, and this column urges every reader to heed them.
From the heat of the outdoors to the heat of the High Court in Edinburgh, where a rather different kind of meltdown has been confirmed. Peter Murrell, the former chief executive of the Caledonian Independence Society and estranged husband of the former First Lady of North Britain, has pleaded guilty to embezzling £400,310.65 of party funds over twelve years. The shopping list – revealed across 125 glorious pages of court documents – includes a £124,550 motorhome, a Jaguar, a Volkswagen Golf, two Bremont watches, a £4,225 fountain pen, and a silver wine coaster. A silver wine coaster. Purchased, one must note, with money donated by party faithful who presumably imagined it might fund, say, Scottish independence rather than Mr Murrell’s weekend touring arrangements. He has been remanded in custody, handcuffed before a hushed courtroom, and First Minister Swinney has declared himself “horrified.” This Author is horrified too, though perhaps most of all by the fountain pen. £4,225. For a pen.
The Kingdom’s senior physicians have meanwhile declared – with all the solemnity of a medical college that has found its unifying cause – that screen time harms children, likening the consensus to that which once surrounded smoking. The Academy of Royal Physicians has submitted its verdict to the government’s consultation on restricting digital salons for the under-sixteens, which closes this very evening. Technology arrangements for young persons may include curfews, stronger age checks, or outright bans – even reaching platforms such as the Children’s Gaming Pavilion. This Author, who survived childhood with nothing more stimulating than a lending library, finds she cannot entirely disagree. Though she notes that seventy thousand consultation submissions were filed – presumably online – which does suggest the grown-ups are not entirely immune either.
Lord Wolfson of Next – a man who earned in excess of £7 million last year, as the government’s own spokesperson was delighted to remind us – has sounded the alarm over youth unemployment. Where once Next received ten applicants per shop vacancy, it now receives nineteen. Lord Wolfson blames the government’s National Insurance increases and minimum wage rises; the government, with barely a raised eyebrow, suggests that a man on £7 million might perhaps not lead the charge on the financial anxieties of the young and inexperienced. Both parties make fair points. This Author observes merely that when the lord of the clothing emporium and the minister of the Royal Exchequer agree only that the other fellow is wrong, it is usually the young person with no job who is left standing in the cold – which, given Tuesday’s temperatures, may at least be a mercy.
And finally, a dispatch from the natural world, where it transpires that Britain’s rarest birds of prey – eagles, red kites, peregrine falcons, hen harriers, goshawks, barn owls – are being shot, trapped, and poisoned in their hundreds, notwithstanding decades of legal protection. The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds reports 921 confirmed attacks between 2015 and 2024, more than half on or near land managed for game shooting. The motive, the Society says plainly, is money: fewer hawks means more pheasants means more paying guns. This Author confesses that the spectacle of a gentleman paying handsomely to shoot a pheasant, while a gamekeeper dispatches the hawk that might have beaten him to it, has a certain bleak circularity that almost deserves a mention in the motorhome’s fountain pen’s wine coaster’s court documents. Almost.
I am, as ever, your most devoted observer – Lady Whistledown.