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What a peculiar Thursday it is when the best news of the day concerns a vaccination administered to twelve-year-olds, and the worst concerns a television programme that married strangers for sport. This Author shall begin where hope resides.
Landmark research published this very morning reveals that young women vaccinated against HPV at the age of twelve or thirteen now have close to zero risk of dying from cervical cancer before the age of thirty. Between 2020 and 2024, not a single cervical cancer death was recorded in women aged twenty to twenty-four in the Southern Kingdom – the first such five-year period on record. Without the vaccine, some twenty-three deaths would have been expected. Around two hundred lives have already been saved since school-age girls were first offered the jab in 2008. One hesitates to deploy the word miraculous in a society column, but if a single injection can all but eliminate a particular form of cancer, This Author is quite prepared to make an exception. The researchers at Queen Mary University caution, however, that vaccination rates in the Southern Kingdom remain below recommended levels – which is to say, we possess the remedy and are declining to use it with the full enthusiasm the situation demands. A most baffling form of restraint.
To affairs of finance, where the Royal Treasury‘s Monetary Policy Committee is expected to hold interest rates at 3.75% for a fourth consecutive meeting – a record of consistency that would be admirable if it were not born chiefly of anxiety. Inflation sits at 2.8%, higher than the target but lower than feared, owing in no small part to Lord Trump‘s announcement on Wednesday that a peace deal with Persia had been signed, promising the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz and the return of some twenty per cent of the world’s oil and gas supply to its proper purpose. Food price rises have slowed to a seventeen-month low, which the Office of National Statistics reports with the measured relief of a household that has checked the larder and found it somewhat less bare than feared. Whether Lord Trump‘s peace dividend will hold is, of course, a matter upon which This Author would not wager her best bonnet – but for today, the financial gentlemen are choosing stillness over alarm. One supposes that is progress.
Lady Nandy, Secretary of State for Culture, rose before the Grand Assembly on Thursday to declare herself, and the government as a whole, distinctly unsatisfied with Channel 4’s response to the grave allegations arising from that most injudiciously conceived programme, Married at First Sight UK. The Broadcasting Society’s Panorama programme reported in May that two female cast members had alleged rape during filming, with a third describing a non-consensual act – allegations the men concerned deny. Channel 4 has since removed all episodes from its streaming service and commissioned an external review, yet proposes to publish only a summary of its findings, rather than the full report. This Author does not pretend surprise that an institution which thought it sound entertainment to marry strangers on television should also think a summary an adequate accounting for what followed. Lady Nandy has promised further discussions with the broadcaster in the coming week. One trusts she will bring her full dissatisfaction with her.
Meanwhile, the Crown Health Security Agency has issued amber heat health alerts covering the east, south-east and south-west of the Southern Kingdom, as well as the Midlands, valid from noon on Thursday until Tuesday evening. Temperatures are forecast to climb above 30 degrees Celsius on Friday, and again from Sunday – potentially reaching official heatwave conditions in parts of the south and east. This, it must be noted, comes barely a month after the Meteorological Office described May’s 35.1 degrees Celsius at Kew Gardens as one of the most extreme high temperature events in observational records. The British climate has apparently tired of its reputation for reliable disappointment and is now competing with itself for excess. This Author recommends fans, cold lemonade, and the sensible adjustment of all outdoor engagements. Amber, Gentle Reader. Not a suggestion.
Finally, a dispatch from the prehistoric that is somehow the most charming intelligence of the day. Archaeologists have unearthed what they believe to be a far older, simpler predecessor to Stonehenge, a mere three miles from that celebrated monument in the village of Bulford. What remains of this ancient structure is, charmingly, two holes in the ground – holes that once held wooden posts aligned precisely with the sun on both the summer and winter solstices, exactly as Stonehenge is. The site has been dated to approximately five thousand years old, predating Stonehenge by five centuries, making it the architectural equivalent of a first draft. Pottery, flint tools, and animal bones suggest our ancestors gathered here with some ceremony. This Author finds the notion rather affecting: that humanity’s earliest instinct, upon encountering the mystery of the heavens, was to plant two sticks in the ground, stand between them, and look up. Some things, it appears, do not change.
I am, as ever, your most devoted observer – Lady Whistledown.