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Picture, if you will, a man boarding a train in Manchester wearing Adidas trainers, a dark T-shirt, and the general air of someone who has just returned a library book. Picture that same man stepping off at Euston Grand Terminus in a suit. Add a tie twenty minutes later. Lord Burnham, the Kingdom’s prime minister-in-waiting, has not yet reached the Prime Minister’s Residence, and already the great question of our age is not the cost of living, nor the war in Ukraine, but this: shall it be Wallabees or Oxfords at the despatch box? This Author awaits the answer with bated breath and a full lorgnette.
Yet wardrobe theatre aside, Lord Burnham has wasted no time in his first substantive act as prime minister-designate, declaring that the government’s cherished digital identity scheme – that £1.8 billion monument to bureaucratic ambition, which nearly three million people signed a petition opposing – shall be buried without ceremony. The resources, his office assures us, will go instead to the cost of living. That the scheme was born under Lord Starmer, watered down by Lord Starmer, and is now abolished by Lord Burnham, suggests that the scheme’s greatest enemy was always time rather than principle. One does admire a policy capable of defeating itself.
From one pair of brothers reinventing themselves to another pair whose reinventions the law has rather firmly interrupted. Andrew and Tristan Tate – those self-appointed professors of masculine philosophy – were arrested in the American Colonies on Saturday evening, following the issuance of thirty-eight fresh charges by British authorities. Andrew now faces forty-two charges in the Kingdom in total; Tristan, seventeen. The charges include counts of a nature so grave that even this column, which has survived scandals of considerable variety, will not dress them in wit. Seven alleged victims have now been identified. Their lawyer declared to the world that “the world knows Andrew and Tristan are innocent,” which is the sort of statement one makes when one has run out of more specific arguments. Extradition proceedings have commenced. This Author shall report further as the courts permit.
On a Sunday when gravity presses close, This Author must also note a story of a quieter, more personal sorrow. Kirandeep Kaur, twenty-four years old, came from the Punjab to the Capital in September 2024 to study, to work, and to build a life. Her sister Gursharan, speaking from India, said simply: “She was my world.” Kirandeep was killed in her home in Hayes on the twelfth of July, stabbed as she slept beside her husband and infant child. A man has been charged with her murder. No wit is equal to this. This Author records it only because to omit it would be the greater wrong.
To lighter, if equally maddening, affairs. The Continental Alliance has introduced its Entry Exit System, requiring non-EU travellers to surrender fingerprints and photographs at every border crossing. The boss of Rome’s principal airport reports that processing times have nearly tripled. Passengers in Faro speak of bugs in the machinery. Families from Yorkshire waited two hours to exit their aircraft with young children. Ryanair, never an institution to let an opportunity for indignation pass untapped, has urged passengers to “allow extra time” and “be prepared for extended waits” – advice that would have been equally useful had it simply read “do not leave the Kingdom this summer.” One supposes the Continental Alliance considers this progress. One supposes many things about the Continental Alliance.
And finally, since it is a Sunday and one must end somewhere approaching hope: Bruno Mars descended upon the Capital’s Grand Stadium Friday last wearing an England football scarf, a Union Jack bucket hat, and carrying a Paddington Bear. Seventy-five thousand souls received him as a returning deity. He emerged beneath a stained-glass window in a bejewelled red suit, prayed on film beforehand for a good performance, and opened with a slow R&B ballad – because why give the crowd exactly what they expect when you can make them wait thirty seconds and then simply be magnificent? It being the third heatwave of 2026, with Bournemouth enduring fifteen consecutive days above its own threshold of discomfort and the driest central England since 1997 settling over the land like a warm wool blanket, seventy-five thousand people dancing until midnight was, perhaps, the most sensible response to everything. This Author cannot fault the logic.
I am, as ever, your most devoted observer – Lady Whistledown.