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There are five words spoken this Sunday that this Author cannot shake loose from her bonnet: “a crime I did not commit.” They fell from the lips of the Former First Lady of North Britain in an exclusive audience with the Broadcasting Society, and they have been rattling about ever since like a shilling in an empty collecting plate.
The Former First Lady addressed the nation on the matter of her estranged husband, Mr Murrell, who has admitted embezzling £400,000 from the Caledonian Independence Society — the very party she led for nearly a decade. She refused to apologise, struggled to restrain her tears, and noted, with admirable composure, that several gifts he had bestowed upon her turned out to have been purchased with stolen funds. One wonders what becomes of the sentiment attached to such trinkets. She was not charged following a police investigation, a fact she was at pains to mention. This Author notes only that she shared responsibility for monitoring the party’s accounts during the very years the embezzlement occurred, between 2010 and 2022 — a detail that the Gentle Readership may find as thought-provoking as this Author does.
Meanwhile, scarcely had the Former First Lady‘s tears dried than Lord Streeting arrived in the Sunday papers, freshly resigned from the cabinet a fortnight past, and already performing the political equivalent of rearranging one’s former employer’s furniture from the pavement outside. He has suggested cutting employers’ National Insurance to encourage businesses to hire young people — this being the selfsame National Insurance that his own Progressive Assembly government raised to 15% only last year, partly to fund the National Health Society he himself then oversaw. The consistency is, shall we say, bracing.
Lord Streeting has also floated new North Sea drilling for oil and gas — a policy rather at odds with the government’s green ambitions — and declared that the Kingdom‘s future lies “one day back in the Continental Alliance.” He intends, he says, to challenge Lord Starmer in any leadership contest. This Author has seen debutantes make subtler entrances into a ballroom.
Now, to a dispatch that is — and this Author chooses her words with care — genuinely heartening. Scientists have discovered a new species of fungus in Britain that kills the invasive heath-star moss, a foreign plant that has been spreading aggressively across hillsides, sand dunes, and garden fences since its arrival from the southern hemisphere in the 1940s. The fungus leaves what researchers have poetically termed “fairy rings of death” across the landscape. This Author approves enormously of both the phenomenon and the nomenclature.
The discovery was made by one Dr George Greiff, aged thirty, who first spotted the tell-tale dead mosses on a cliffside on the Isle of Wight four years ago. Working with scientists in the Kingdom and France, he has now identified the culprit fungus — an entirely new species, never before seen by science. Around 2,000 non-native plants and animals have been introduced to Britain over the centuries; it is rather gratifying that nature has, at last, begun to write its own strongly worded letter of objection.
From the microbial to the maritime: Lord Healey, the War Office secretary, has announced at a security summit in Singapore that the Kingdom, the American Colonies, and Australia will together spend £150 million developing underwater drone technology under the Aukus alliance. The drones will protect undersea cables, conduct surveillance, and — charmingly — carry out strikes. Lord Healey acknowledged with admirable candour that Aukus had, until now, “talked too much and delivered too little.” A self-awareness rarely spotted in the wild corridors of the War Office, and this Author salutes it accordingly.
Finally, and with all the gravity the occasion demands, this Author turns to Kent, where nearly 800 households remain entirely without water this Sunday, and a further 4,000 face intermittent supply — the latest chapter in a disruption that began on the 23rd of May. South East Water has distributed one million litres of bottled water and delivered more than 2.4 million litres by tanker. Storage tanks in Wraik Hill and Cranbrook are described as being at “a critical level.” The company has apologised and noted the particular cruelty of the situation given the warm weather. The Gentle Readership in the affected parishes has this Author’s complete and unironic sympathy — for there is nothing remotely amusing about a Sunday without the means to make tea.
I am, as ever, your most devoted observer – Lady Whistledown.