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A number keeps presenting itself to This Author this Saturday morning, and she cannot shake it loose: twenty-one years. Twenty-one years is the minimum sentence handed to Vickrum Digwa for the murder of Henry Nowak, a gentle eighteen-year-old walking home from a night out in Southampton. It is a number that ought to settle matters. And yet it has, instead, produced a fresh catastrophe – this one imported at great speed from across the Atlantic.
The American Vice-President, a gentleman This Author shall charitably describe as Lord Vance of the Colonies, took it upon himself to post upon Elon’s Lair that Henry’s death was evidence of a “mass invasion of migrants” and that the only proper response was “righteous anger.” The Nowak family, with a dignity that puts the Vice-President to shame, have publicly asked that their son’s death not be weaponised to stir division. The Prime Minister’s Residence responded that “our politics should bring people together even in the most terrible of circumstances.” This Author could not have phrased it better – and notes, with considerable asperity, that the Crown Prosecution Service has confirmed Digwa was born British. Interference of this nature, unsolicited and factually cavalier, is, one might suggest, the very thing the American Colonies once complained about receiving from us. The irony is not lost.
On a note of genuine sorrow, the theatrical world has lost a figure of uncommon warmth and talent. Lord Head, beloved of a generation for his portrayal of the librarian Rupert Giles in the supernatural drama Buffy the Vampire Slayer, has died peacefully at the age of seventy-two, surrounded by his family, of complications due to pneumonia. His daughters, Emily and Daisy, issued a statement of such grace and feeling that This Author was obliged to set down her pen for a moment. Fellow players from Buffy lined up to testify to a man of exceptional kindness, his co-star noting he was “the best actor in the cast” – a verdict delivered with an affecting lack of vanity. Lord Head also graced Ted Lasso, Merlin, and Little Britain during his long career. The stage is measurably dimmer for his departure, and the nation’s sitting rooms, where he kept so many company on a Friday evening, feel it too.
Today being the sixth of June, This Author pauses, as all right-thinking persons must. Eighty-two years have passed since British, American, and Canadian troops stormed the beaches of Normandy and began the liberation of France from occupation most terrible. This year’s commemorations are the first since ninety-eight additional names were carved upon the British Normandy Memorial above what was once Gold Beach – men whose inaccurate records had denied them their rightful place on the stone until now. Cecil Green, mortally wounded in Normandy yet died in a British hospital, is among the newly honoured. His son John, touching the newly inscribed letters, described it as “a strange mixture of being glad and happy and sad at the same time.” This Author doubts a more precise description of grief well-resolved has ever been offered. Only six veterans are confirmed attending this year – among the last. We would do well to listen while we still may.
In news that This Author receives with nothing short of a standing ovation, the Welsh singer Duffy has announced her return to the stage – her first performance in more than fifteen years. Those who recall her vanishing will remember the eventual, devastating explanation: she had been drugged, abducted, and taken abroad, an ordeal she has described with extraordinary courage. On Friday, she told followers via her Portrait Gallery account that she would host a small, balloted, “secret intimate gig” in the Capital on the fifth of July, where she will sing new songs. The capacity, she warns, is limited. This Author suspects the ballot will prove the most hotly contested since certain elections she could name – and rather more honestly conducted. The Principality’s most luminous musical export is coming home, and the nation ought to be very glad indeed.
Finally, a dispatch from Essex that reads as though fortune herself has a singularly dark sense of humour. Anthony Canty, thirty-nine, won a million pounds in the Euromillions lottery in May 2020, days after performing CPR upon a collapsed police officer aboard a public omnibus – a deed of such spontaneous heroism that one almost suspects the universe of rewarding virtue. He vowed to keep his job. He celebrated with champagne. He was, by all accounts, exactly the sort of person good things ought to happen to. And yet Mr Canty has died following a suspected hit-and-run collision in Tiptree, Essex, on the twenty-first of May. An eighteen-year-old driver of a Ford motor carriage was arrested and released under investigation. This Author has no witty aside to offer here. She has only the quiet, stubborn conviction that a man who saved a life deserved considerably more of his own.
I am, as ever, your most devoted observer – Lady Whistledown.