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Dearest Gentle Reader,
Five prime ministers in four years. This Author pauses, sets down her morning coffee, and reads that sentence again. Not because it is unclear, but because it deserves to be read twice, the way one re-reads a bill one cannot possibly have incurred. And yet here we are, on this particular Monday, late in the month of July, watching the corridors of power receive their fifth occupant since the summer of 2022.
Lord Burnham arrives at the Prime Minister’s Residence today, reportedly without a lectern for his opening address – a detail that will either read as refreshing informality or as a man who has misplaced something important. He is, we are told, “acutely conscious” of the churn through which he now takes his turn. One imagines he is. His predecessors include Lord Johnson, who departed under circumstances we need not rehearse; Lady Truss, who lasted approximately the lifespan of a head of lettuce; Lord Sunak; and, most recently, Lord Starmer, who departs after 746 days with a brief address and, notably, a lectern. Conventions, it seems, are ditched on the way in and recovered on the way out. Lord Burnham has spoken of “People’s Question Time” sessions with voters around the Kingdom – which This Author considers either a magnificent democratic impulse or an act of considerable personal bravery.
No sooner had the new Prime Minister’s arrival been announced than a departure of a different flavour crossed This Author’s desk. Lord Timpson, the prisons minister who came to government from the shoe-repair trade and brought with him a most practical philosophy – that reformed persons make good employees and good employees seldom require reforming – has resigned. His statement describes leaving the prisons and probation service “in a much healthier and happier state,” which is either a generous self-assessment or a very low bar, given that his inheritance was a prison estate of near-total capacity and considerable violence. To his considerable credit, assaults on staff and self-harm are both falling. A minister who improved something measurable, resigned without scandal, and attributed no blame to anyone whatsoever. The ton is baffled and slightly suspicious.
This Author must pause here to mark, with genuine sorrow, the passing of Edward Stourton, broadcaster and journalist of forty years’ distinction, who died on Saturday aged sixty-eight. He had reported from Lebanon, from Afghanistan, from Washington during the final years of the Reagan presidency – and then submitted himself cheerfully to a phone-in programme on the Broadcasting Society’s Morning Programme called, with charming directness, Call Ed Stourton. His colleagues speak of “warm intelligence,” “immense capacity,” and – most tellingly – “minimum ego.” In an age when ego alone seems sufficient qualification for public life, this is an epitaph of considerable force. He is already missed.
On altogether lighter matters – and the Gentle Reader will forgive this Author the gear-change – the celebrated frontman of The 1975, one Matty Healy, has wed his betrothed, the model Gabbriette Bechtel, at what is described as a private ceremony at Madonna’s former estate in the Hollywood Hills of the Californian Metropolis. Charli XCX was reportedly in attendance. The bride, for her hen celebration in Las Vegas, was handcuffed and carried onto a private aircraft by a gentleman dressed as a constable – a scene that, This Author notes, would in any other context require rather more paperwork. The engagement was confirmed, as all modern engagements must apparently be, via a large black diamond ring displayed upon the Portrait Gallery. The groom’s mother, television personality Denise Welch, confirmed proceedings via podcast. Romance is not dead, Gentle Reader. It has merely migrated to digital salons and tribute bands.
Finally, a dispatch from the Principality that has left This Author in a state of cold fury on behalf of five families in Pontycymer, Bridgend county. Welsh Water has informed residents of five terraced houses that a shared water pipe beneath their properties is leaking – and that the cost of repairing it falls to them personally, at an estimated seven thousand pounds each. They have eleven days to comply. They have been given no evidence of where precisely the leak sits, which means their insurers decline to pay. The water authority, meanwhile, notes crisply that it neither owns nor manages the pipe in question. This Author would very much like to know who does, since apparently the answer is five householders who, until quite recently, believed themselves to be merely living above it. The threat of prosecution under the Water Industry Act completes the tableau. Seven thousand pounds, eleven days, no evidence, no insurer, and a prosecution notice. The law, Gentle Reader, has a truly remarkable sense of humour – though the residents of Pontycymer appear not yet to have found it.
I am, as ever, your most devoted observer – Lady Whistledown.