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Breakfasting this Saturday morning, This Author reached for the marmalade and found it had quite liquefied in the jar. A fitting metaphor, one feels, for the state of the Kingdom entire: everything that was once solid has, over the course of this extraordinary week, begun to run.
Lady Mahmood of the Office of Home Affairs has unveiled what she is pleased to call a new “capped safe and legal” route for refugees to arrive upon these shores, drawing inspiration from Canada’s celebrated community sponsorship scheme – a model which has resettled nearly 400,000 souls since 1979, with 70% finding gainful employment within a year. Universities, community groups, and businesses shall be permitted to sponsor applicants directly. Most gallant. Most compassionate. Most conveniently timed, one cannot help but note, given that Lord Burnham‘s anticipated ascent to prime ministerial glory grows ever nearer, and Lady Mahmood would very much like her immigration bill to survive the week without a rebellion. The Conservatives have declared that not a single additional person ought to arrive until illegal crossings cease entirely – a position that is, shall we say, brisk in its clarity if somewhat short on warmth.
Meanwhile, the Meteorological Office has confirmed what every limp and perspiring soul in the Southern Kingdom already knew: Friday’s temperature of 37.3C at Santon Downham in Suffolk has broken the record for the hottest June day in the Kingdom – for the third consecutive day. The fifty-year-old record was not merely surpassed but routed, beaten by more than a full degree. The Principality peaked at 35.1C; even North Britain managed a positively volcanic 29.2C at Eskdalemuir. Six National Health Society trusts declared critical incidents under the strain of heat-related patients, hundreds of schools shuttered their doors, and MRI machines – this detail alone deserves a raised eyebrow – overheated in their very housings. The good news, such as it is: scattered showers are promised for the weekend. The Southern Kingdom may yet be permitted to cool, if not to collect itself entirely.
And the lightning, Gentle Reader – let us not overlook the lightning. As if the heat alone were insufficient drama, the thunderstorms of Friday night visited Sussex and Kent with considerable enthusiasm: houses struck in Eastbourne and Bexhill within minutes of each other, a blaze in Crawley’s Thatcher Close, three separate fires in Kent alone. Six fires in total, battled by crews throughout the small hours. No casualties reported at any incident, which This Author considers something of a miracle given that the heavens appeared to be making a very pointed argument.
From the infernal to the familial. The Duke of Sussex and the Duchess of Sussex have accepted an invitation to stay upon a royal estate during their visit to the Kingdom next month – the first such family trip in four years, and one that shall include young Archie, seven, and Lilibet, five. His Majesty the King has not glimpsed his grandchildren in person since the Platinum Jubilee of 2022. The precise residence remains undisclosed, as does the exact security arrangement – though it is understood that the Palace has offered no additional protection beyond whatever the Office of Home Affairs may provide. The Duke visits principally to launch the year-long countdown to the Invictus Games, to be held in Birmingham next July. Whether the visit shall produce warmth, reconciliation, or merely a great many photographs taken at a careful distance, This Author cannot say – but she shall be watching with undivided attention.
A matter far graver now demands This Author’s pen. The Nottingham University Hospitals maternity review published this week has revealed that 260 babies died or were seriously injured through what investigators described as “deep-rooted, systemic and sustained” failings – the largest scandal of its kind in National Health Society history. The review owes its very existence, the senior midwife conducting it declared, to two families: the Hawkinses and the Andrewses, whose connection began with a single WhatsApp message between two grieving fathers. “Do you want to speak?” Gary Andrews asked Dr Jack Hawkins. From that question, a campaign grew that could not be silenced. Harriet Hawkins was stillborn in April 2016; an initial review found “no obvious fault.” The Hawkinses, both working within the very trust responsible, pushed until an external review identified thirteen failings and concluded her death was almost certainly preventable. That these families transformed private devastation into public accountability is, in the truest sense, an act of extraordinary courage.
And finally, a dispatch of a lighter sort, though no less peculiar for that. It has come to This Author’s attention that a Scottish castle recently acquired by the celebrated comedian Alan Carr – Ayton Castle in the Scottish Borders, purchased for upwards of £3.25m – contains several hundred items that nobody, absolutely nobody, wishes to keep. These include more than ninety lots from a “cement menagerie”: painted sculptures of animals, historical figures, and rural scenes, created by a retired joiner in the 1960s for the entertainment of his disabled son, later relocated to the castle in 2021. Both Claudia Winkleman’s co-host in reality television glory and the castle’s former owners have declined to take the sculptures with them. They go to auction at the castle on the fifth of July. Gentle Reader, if you have long wished to own a painted cement goose or a concrete rendering of a historical figure of ambiguous provenance, your moment has quite unexpectedly arrived.
I am, as ever, your most devoted observer – Lady Whistledown.