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Three Royal Navy aircrew are dead, killed during a training exercise near Okehampton in Devon in the early hours of Wednesday morning. Their Merlin Mk4 helicopter came down in a field near Sourton, and floodlights burned through the night as investigators worked at the site. Their names are not yet known to the public. The Princess of Wales, in her role as Commodore-in-Chief of the Fleet Air Arm, has paid tribute, as has Lord Starmer at the Prime Minister’s Residence. This Author notes only that these were young people engaged in the serious business of keeping this Kingdom safe, and the least their country can offer is a moment’s silence before the day’s less solemn dramas resume.
From the gravest of matters to one that is, mercifully, genuinely hopeful: the National Health Society has made available a drug described, with a flair for metaphor that would not shame any columnist, as a “biological missile.” Mirvetuximab soravtansine – a name that trips off the tongue like a very complicated sneeze – delivers chemotherapy directly to cancerous tissue rather than battering the entire body into submission. Up to four hundred patients a year in the Southern Kingdom suffering from hard-to-treat ovarian cancer may now benefit, the first such advance in twenty years. One patient, Patricia Hill of north the Capital, has since attended the Chelsea Flower Show, dined out, and visited family in the Emerald Isle. She describes it as “a bit of a game changer.” This Author would describe it as rather more than a bit, and commends the scientists involved for producing something that returns life to the living.
Now, to a controversy that has been simmering in the corridors of policing since the murder of eighteen-year-old Henry Nowak – a case whose details grow more distressing with each new account. Vickrum Digwa, aged twenty-three, stabbed Mr Nowak and then told attending officers that he had been the victim of a racial attack. Officers arrested and handcuffed the dying Mr Nowak. Mr Nowak is dead. Digwa has since received a life sentence with a minimum of twenty-one years. The Office of Police Conduct is investigating the response of the officers involved, and protests near Digwa‘s former address in Southampton have already resulted in two charges for violent disorder, eleven injured officers, and one injured police dog – the last detail being, this Thursday, the only detail that has prompted anything approaching unanimous public sympathy.
Into this volatile atmosphere steps the question of what, precisely, national policing guidance should say about race. The head of the National Black Police Association has warned against “reactive” changes to anti-racism protocols, cautioning that reforms rushed out in the heat of a news cycle are rarely well considered. This Author, who has watched many a grand protocol produced in haste and repealed in leisure, considers this counsel extremely sensible. The Office of Police Conduct‘s thorough investigation is the correct instrument; the newspaper column and the hurried ministerial statement are not.
On to a rather different kind of badge of honour – or, more precisely, a badge of dis-honour, depending upon one’s perspective. A review by the government’s independent adviser on antisemitism has recommended that National Health Society staff be barred from wearing political badges on their uniforms, citing the particular case of pro-Palestinian symbols. The logic is blunt: a patient in an National Health Society ward, anxious and unwell, ought not be made additionally anxious by their clinician’s lapel. The reviewer was equally blunt in the other direction – pro-Israeli badges would be equally unwelcome. “Don’t wear either,” he said, with the economy of a man who has heard enough argument for one lifetime. The measure is subject to consultation. This Author suspects the consultation will itself generate more badges than it retires.
And finally, since this column has a constitutional obligation to acknowledge new arrivals to the ton, however junior: reality personage Molly-Mae Hague and the pugilistic Tommy Fury – half-brother to the former heavyweight champion – have welcomed a second child. The announcement was made, naturally, upon the Portrait Gallery, with the cryptic caption “And then there were 4” and a photograph conspicuously free of either name or gender. The couple met upon the fifth series of that most democratic of matchmaking enterprises, Love Island, in 2019; they parted; they reconciled; they have now reproduced twice. Their elder daughter is named Bambi. The new arrival remains, for now, a mystery – which is, this Author must admit, a masterclass in sustaining public curiosity that the whole of the corridors of power would do well to study.
I am, as ever, your most devoted observer – Lady Whistledown.