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Dearest Gentle Reader,
Twenty-nine thousand. That is the precise number of lightning strikes that descended upon the Southern Kingdom in the small hours of this Tuesday morning, as though the heavens themselves had read Monday’s political dispatches and arrived at the only reasonable conclusion. The Meteorological Office confirms the figure with the serene authority of an institution that has seen everything and is surprised by nothing. Floods. Fires. Four hundred calls to the London Fire Brigade. A red alert due Wednesday, with temperatures threatening forty degrees Celsius. The climate, it seems, is staging its own leadership contest, and it intends to win.
And yet, extraordinary as twenty-nine thousand bolts of celestial fury may be, they are not the most dramatic thing to have struck these islands overnight. That honour belongs to the corridors of power, where Lord Starmer has set out a timetable for his departure and Lord Streeting – widely regarded as the most formidable rival to Lord Burnham – folded with the quiet dignity of a man who has done the arithmetic. Lord Burnham would become the Kingdom’s fifth prime minister in four years, a sentence that deserves a moment of silent contemplation. Five. In four years. This Author does not wish to alarm anyone, but the Meteorological Office might consider issuing a red alert for constitutional weather as well.
Whispers abound as to who shall retain their positions. Lady Reeves was conspicuously absent from the farewell applause outside the Prime Minister’s Residence, having materialised instead at Lord Burnham‘s celebratory gathering with the instincts of a woman who reads a room with exceptional speed. Whether she shall keep her place at the Royal Exchequer remains the great speculation of the morning, with some murmuring that Lord Streeting – freshly endorsed, freshly loyal – might step into her shoes. Lord Streeting denies any such offer was made. This Author notes, with characteristic neutrality, that the most emphatic denials in politics tend to age like milk in June heat.
On a considerably more uplifting note – and one that reminds us that science occasionally delivers genuine miracles rather than merely weather forecasts – the National Health Society has announced the availability of the first drug capable of delaying the onset of type 1 diabetes. Teplizumab, a form of immunotherapy, may grant children and young people three additional years before symptoms take hold and lifelong insulin treatment begins. The medicines body called the decision “genuinely exciting,” which, for a body not known for exclamation, is practically a standing ovation. Hundreds of children each year stand to benefit. This Author, who has been known to raise an eyebrow at most things, raises a glass instead.
From the healing arts to the rather less healing arts of the ticket trade. The Trades and Commerce Watchdog has ordered StubHub to refund more than fifty thousand customers and pay a fine of nine hundred thousand pounds for the ancient and dishonourable practice of hiding fees until the precise moment a customer is too excited about a concert to retreat. The average refund amounts to ten pounds per transaction – roughly the price of a glass of wine at the sort of venue whose tickets were being resold. StubHub describes the matter as an “isolated platform error.” The Trades and Commerce Watchdog describes it as illegal. This Author suggests these two characterisations are not, strictly speaking, compatible, and that fifty thousand customers who discovered the real price only at checkout might have a view on the matter themselves.
Finally, a dispatch from the National Portrait Gallery – that most civilised of institutions – which has found itself engulfed in rather less civilised controversy. A forty-minute video installation by a Turner Prize-winning artist, referencing the Bengal famine and Sir Winston Churchill’s wartime role therein, has been withdrawn following an open letter signed by more than fifty peers, including Churchill’s own grandson. The artist, one Helen Cammock, states she does not accept external pressure and that art exists to challenge. The gallery, for its part, has permitted the work to depart. Whether this constitutes a victory for scholarly rigour or a defeat for artistic freedom is, this Tuesday, a matter on which the ton is very much divided. This Author merely observes that a forty-minute video about historical catastrophe has somehow created a fresh one, which is, at minimum, a testament to its staying power.
I am, as ever, your most devoted observer – Lady Whistledown.