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Picture, if you will, a Friday upon which a monarch voluntarily confesses to his tax bill, a government minister tells his superior to “stay classy” on Elon’s Lair, and forty hospital staff are caught peeking at a child’s medical notes with quite as much restraint as a debutante eyeing a tray of pastries. This Author has had quieter mornings. She has also had better tea, but that is beside the point.
His Majesty the King has made history this Friday – not by conquering territories or commissioning portraits, but by becoming the first British monarch to reveal his personal tax bill. He paid £12.9 million to the Royal Exchequer for 2024-25, placing him comfortably among the Kingdom’s top one hundred taxpayers. The Prince of Wales, not to be outdone in the virtue of openness, declared £7.76 million for the same period. One suspects the announcement was intended to project magnanimous transparency. It has instead prompted the entire nation to do arithmetic it was entirely unprepared to perform on a Friday morning.
The Sovereign Grant, meanwhile, is to nearly double to just under £100 million by 2027-28, a figure that becomes more intelligible once one understands that the Palace has required the replacement of pipes, cables, and boilers unchanged for sixty years. This Author offers no opinion on whether a building that last updated its plumbing before the moon landing deserves sympathy or suspicion. She offers only the observation that the renovation bill stands at £369 million, and that the Kingdom’s landlords are absolutely thriving.
And yet, having spent £369 million on the Palace, His Majesty and Queen Camilla have no intention whatsoever of living in it. The royal accounts confirm that the couple will remain at Clarence House, which stands beside St James’s Palace and has been their home since 2005. Officials cite a desire for greater public access to the Palace, as well as security considerations. This Author, who has observed enough of the ton to know comfort when she sees it, suspects the real reason is rather simpler: both parties are in their late seventies, and moving house is dreadful at any age.
This Author turns now to a matter she would dearly prefer not to write, but which demands to be written. Vickrum Digwa, convicted of the murder of eighteen-year-old Henry Nowak – a Southampton university student stabbed to death last December – has been exposed in newly released police body-worn footage telling repeated, elaborate falsehoods to officers on the night of the killing. He claimed he had been racially attacked. He claimed Henry had been drunk. He claimed he was the victim. Not one syllable of it was true, and the footage has made every word of his deception horribly plain.
What gives the footage its particular and devastating weight is what the Nowak family have long asserted: that Henry lay dying in handcuffs while Digwa, who had just stabbed him multiple times, was never restrained at all. Hampshire police have now confirmed this. Henry’s father has described his son’s treatment as inhumane and degrading, and the contrast with the courtesy shown to his killer as unbearable. Digwa has been jailed for life with a minimum of twenty-one years. That sentence is correct. That it needed to be arrived at through such a welter of institutional failure makes it no less necessary to say so plainly. Henry Nowak deserved better.
To lighter, if not less bewildering, affairs. In the corridors of power, a most entertaining dispute has erupted between Lord Starmer and his Home Secretary, Lady Mahmood, over the fate of one Immigration Minister who had the audacity to publish his own opinions in a newspaper. The minister – who is not on this Author’s existing register of noble names and shall therefore pass unnamed – wrote a piece in The Times arguing that care workers who had followed the rules ought not to be penalised by new visa changes. Lady Mahmood learned of this article when a journalist rang her office for comment. This is, in the world of ministerial relations, roughly equivalent to a footman announcing a surprise dinner party to the cook by way of a stranger at the door.
Lady Mahmood reportedly believes the minister should be dismissed. Lord Starmer‘s residence has let it be known that he remains in post. The minister himself, apparently untroubled, posted on Elon’s Lair: “Stay classy!” This Author would like to report she has seen more dignified resignations. She would also like to report she has seen fewer. The Progressive Assembly is, as ever, a theatre with a rather unpredictable cast.
For those planning summer travel – and given the Southern Kingdom’s recent meteorological offerings, one cannot blame anyone for seeking warmer shores – This Author brings an urgent advisory. The aviation regulator has confirmed that power banks and vapes now constitute the single greatest fire risk aboard aircraft, with incidents involving lithium battery devices very nearly doubling in a single year to 643 reported cases. The average passenger, apparently, now boards a flight carrying four separate lithium-powered devices. The average passenger also, apparently, continues to pack them in the hold luggage despite all guidance to the contrary. One EasyJet flight last month was diverted to Rome on account of a power bank in the hold. Rome! One wonders if the passengers thanked their reckless fellow traveller for the unexpected detour.
Finally, the story that has demonstrated conclusively that hospital staff, like the rest of the ton, are constitutionally incapable of minding their own business. A three-year-old boy, gravely injured after an incident in a crocodile enclosure in Cambridgeshire, was recovering at Addenbrooke’s Hospital when up to forty members of staff accessed his medical records without apparent clinical justification. The hospital has referred itself to the relevant authorities and promises robust disciplinary action. This Author notes that restrictions had already been placed on the child’s records to prevent unnecessary access, and that forty members of staff accessed them anyway. The crocodile, one is forced to conclude, is not the most alarming creature in this particular story.
I am, as ever, your most devoted observer – Lady Whistledown.