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Breakfast was barely finished when the news arrived in such volume that This Author was obliged to set down her kedgeree entirely and reach, instead, for her pen. Wednesday, it seems, has decided to make a thorough spectacle of itself.
We begin where civic virtue and criminal ingenuity collide most visibly: upon the British high street. The government has announced that the rogue emporia flogging contraband cigarettes, illegal vapes, and sundry items of dubious provenance may henceforth be shuttered for up to twelve months, rather than the previous three. Credit, of all people, must go to the Broadcasting Society, whose nine months of investigative diligence shamed the authorities into action far more effectively than any amount of parliamentary speechifying. Lady Mahmood, the Home Secretary, praised the reporting handsomely, observing that organised criminality causes people to lose faith not merely in their local area but in democracy itself. A stirring sentiment. This Author notes, with only the mildest scepticism, that the Broadcasting Society had been requesting an interview with Lady Mahmood on this very subject for nine months before the announcement materialised. Better late than never, Your Ladyship.
To more welcome news from the halls of medicine. Thousands of gentlemen in the Southern Kingdom suffering from prostate cancer are to be offered a precision radiotherapy technique – SABR by name – that reduces their treatment sessions from twenty to a mere five. The National Health Society expects all forty-eight radiotherapy centres across the country to offer this treatment within weeks. Of the 55,000 men diagnosed annually, some 17,500 are considered low or intermediate risk, and approximately 3,500 are expected to take up the new option. This Author does not pretend to understand the precise mechanics of stereotactic ablative radiotherapy, but the principle is sound: a very powerful beam pointed very accurately at a very unwelcome intruder. One wishes the same remedy were available for several figures in public life.
And now to the football, or rather to the rather more serious business conducted behind it. David Sullivan, co-owner of West Ham United, has been revealed to have been barred since 2023 from contact with his own club’s women’s and youth teams, following a safeguarding investigation opened by the Football Association. The restriction – which Mr Sullivan characterises, with magnificent insouciance, as a “meaningless restriction” accepted merely for “a quiet life” – also prevented him from attending women’s and youth matches. He remained, throughout this period, a prominent presence in the directors’ box at the Capital’s Grand Stadium for the men’s games, because naturally one must maintain appearances. He resigned as co-chair on Saturday, ahead of a joint Broadcasting Society and Times investigation in which multiple women came forward with allegations of abuse of power. He denies all wrongdoing. This Author observes only that a restriction one considers entirely meaningless is, as a rule, the sort one does not keep secret for three years.
From human injustice to avian sensation. Hundreds of ornithologists – twitchers, as the enthusiasts charmingly style themselves – have descended upon the town of Caernarfon in the Principality to observe a western reef heron, a grey-blue bird more commonly encountered in Africa, southern Europe, and parts of Asia, and until Saturday entirely unrecorded in these islands. The creature was spotted by one Simon Hugheston-Roberts during his habitual morning walk at Y Foryd and, upon sharing news of the sighting with a birdwatching group via a messaging service, found himself hosting approximately three hundred fellow enthusiasts by the afternoon. The heron is believed to have been blown off course by warm southerly winds. This Author has every sympathy. She too has occasionally found herself somewhere entirely unexpected after an unexpectedly warm afternoon.
Finally, and on a note that admits of no levity whatsoever, This Author must address the scenes that unfolded on Tuesday evening across North Britain. Hundreds of protesters, faces covered, gathered in Glasgow, Edinburgh, and Ayr following a knife attack in Belfast in which the alleged attacker was described as Sudanese. Bins were set alight in Belfast, a bus was burned, and in Glasgow, crowds wearing balaclavas advanced through the city centre until a significant police deployment drove them across the bridges of the Clyde. First Minister Swinney condemned the scenes as unacceptable, stating that North Britain is a welcoming nation. Two men have separately been jailed in Southampton following the violent disorder at a protest over the death of Henry Nowak on 2nd June, in which twelve police officers and a police dog were injured by thrown missiles – wheelie bins and chairs among them. Leon O’Leary received three years and one month; Connor Bishop, two years and eight months. O’Leary was also found to possess, purely decoratively one understands, a samurai sword. This Author refrains from further comment, except to note that the line between a decorative weapon and a brandished one appears, in court, to be rather finely drawn.
I am, as ever, your most devoted observer – Lady Whistledown.