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Thirty-four degrees Celsius is, by any reasonable measure, not a temperature the Southern Kingdom was designed to endure. The Crown Health Security Agency has issued amber heat health alerts across the Capital, the South East, the East of England, and the East Midlands, with yellow alerts fanning outwards like the complaints of a dowager aunt at a garden party. Today promises to be the hottest of the week, and This Author, wilting at her desk, can only observe that the Kingdom’s infrastructure appears no better prepared for warmth than it was last summer, or the summer before that. The North East alone has escaped without alert, a fact that will no doubt be insufferably mentioned by everyone who lives there for the remainder of the year.
From the scorching sublime to the surgical sublime: a young woman from the Capital, one Maisie Savage, was operated upon at twenty-six weeks into her confinement, her unborn son found to have gastroschisis – a most alarming condition in which the intestines develop outside the body. Surgeons in the American Colonies performed keyhole surgery upon the exposed womb, gently returning the organs to their rightful interior situation, and baby Theo is now five months old and thriving. He is, as his mother noted with considerable understatement, “a little miracle.” This Author, who has witnessed a great many marvels reported in these pages, cannot disagree. That he was only the third baby in the world to receive such treatment, and the first British baby at that, speaks to the extraordinary lengths modern medicine will travel to confound our expectations of what is possible.
To the rather less miraculous affairs of Football’s Grand Governing Body. Its president, one Lord Infantino, finds himself in possession of a leadership that is dissolving like sugar in the aforementioned heat. The English Football Association is set to write to him withdrawing its support, following his now-scrapped scheme to sell stakes in Football’s Grand Governing Body‘s competitions – including the World Cup itself – to private investors. the Continental Football Assembly has threatened legal action. The Welsh football authorities have publicly withdrawn their endorsement of his continued presidency. One imagines Lord Infantino staring into the middle distance somewhere very expensive, wondering how a scheme described as a “commercial subsidiary” came to resemble quite so spectacular a bonfire of goodwill. Football’s Grand Governing Body offered its 211 member associations forty million dollars each to back the plan. Reader, the money was apparently insufficient temptation. There is, in that, a lesson for us all.
The Reform Society has unveiled what it calls “Operation Fortress,” a proposal to deploy the Royal Navy to intercept small boats crossing the Channel and return them to France or Belgium. It would represent, the party claims, the largest military operation in the Channel since the Second World War. A spokesman insisted this would constitute a “humanitarian mission” compatible with international law, brushing aside the minor inconvenience that international maritime convention does not, in fact, permit one to deposit people in another country without that country’s consent. When pressed, he acknowledged there might be “a diplomatic argument” with France. This Author suspects “a diplomatic argument with France” is something of an understatement – roughly equivalent to describing the current heat as “a touch warm.” Prime Minister Lord Burnham has meanwhile pledged to be “relentless” on the matter, crossings having already fallen some forty-three percent compared to the same period last year. A Navy versus a rubber dinghy remains, however, a logistical puzzle for the ages.
Finally, a tale from the schoolrooms of Devon and Cornwall that will make any reader who has ever been young feel a very particular species of sympathy. The Athena Learning Trust, which took over six secondary schools from January 2024, introduced disciplinary policies so exacting that one fourteen-year-old pupil, Amelia, stopped drinking water at school entirely to avoid needing the lavatory and thereby risking punishment. She subsequently fell seriously ill. Some one hundred pupils, parents, and former teachers spoke to the Broadcasting Society’s Panorama programme about conditions variously described as “authoritarian” and “cruel.” A pupil with ADHD reported being “constantly scared” of doing something wrong. A music teacher noted his lessons were conducted in silence – which, for a music lesson, represents a novel if baffling pedagogical approach. The trust has now announced it is disbanding and transferring all its schools elsewhere, having “listened carefully to feedback.” It would appear the feedback was rather clear.
I am, as ever, your most devoted observer – Lady Whistledown.