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Gentle Reader, permit This Author to dispense with all preamble and place before you, without ceremony, the matter that has troubled her most this Thursday morning: seventeen-year-old girls, entrusted to the care of the Harrogate Military Academy, subjected to assault, harassment, and worse – at the hands of fellow recruits and, in thirty-two instances, permanent staff. One hundred and seventy-six complaints of inappropriate sexual behaviour between January 2018 and June 2025. Sixteen reports of sexual offences to the North Yorkshire Constabulary in the year to June alone. The War Office calls such behaviour “unacceptable.” This Author calls it a catastrophe, and wonders at what precise number of complaints an institution graduates from “reviewing its culture” to fundamentally dismantling it.
The Army’s spokesperson assures us that “unacceptable and criminal behaviour has absolutely no place in our Armed Forces.” One would hope not. And yet, here it is. One young woman describes an attack that lasted hours. Another describes feeling, in her own words, like a piece of meat. These are not statistics; they are daughters. The Harrogate Military Academy is the largest military training establishment for under-nineteens in the Kingdom. It receives every sixteen-year-old Army recruit. There are currently seventy young women among its eight hundred and eighty-nine junior soldiers. They enlisted hoping for a career. They deserved protection. This Author trusts the investigation now under way will extend well beyond the production of further statements.
To rather lighter, though no less extraordinary, affairs. The corridors of the Ancient University by the Cam have this week witnessed a resignation of some drama. Professor Jason Arday – who, in 2023, became that institution’s youngest ever Black professor, a distinction celebrated with considerable fanfare – has departed “with immediate effect” following an investigation into his academic qualifications, honorary appointments, and allegations of plagiarism in his doctoral thesis. The professor says he is not a liar, that he has faced “an unrelenting level of public scrutiny and personal attack,” and that stepping away is the only means of closing “this chapter.” He adds, with the serene confidence of a man who fully intends a second act, that “this is not the end of my work” and that he will return. This Author neither judges nor applauds; she merely notes that the Ancient University by the Cam has launched its own investigation, and that investigations, once opened, have a disagreeable habit of finding things.
Now, to the Edinburgh Festival of the Arts, where Amanda Knox – acquitted, you will recall, of murdering her British flatmate Meredith Kercher in Italy in 2007 – is preparing to perform a solo comedy show entitled Cartwheel, so named for the infamous story that she performed cartwheels in the police station following her friend’s death. Knox has told the press she does not joke about the murder itself, only about her own vilification, and believes Meredith would have found it funny. Stephanie Kercher, Meredith’s sister, appeared on the Broadcasting Society’s Morning Programme to offer a verdict: “Meredith absolutely wouldn’t find these topics of any comedy value.” A petition signed by over two thousand four hundred people agrees. Knox’s spokesperson, for their part, insists the show honours Kercher’s memory. This Author will simply observe that the distance between honouring a memory and monetising a tragedy is, on occasion, a very short cartwheel indeed.
From the theatrical to the genuinely wicked. Robert Bush, the disgraced undertaker of Hull – jailed for twenty years last Friday after admitting sixty-seven offences, including thirty counts of preventing lawful and decent burial – has composed a letter of apology to his victims. Prosecutors established that thirty-five bodies and more than one hundred sets of ashes were discovered when police raided his premises in March 2024. He gave grieving families the ashes of strangers. One mother, Miss Beverley, learned her stillborn son had been found in a brown paper bag on the parlour floor, nearly two years after his death. Bush writes that he is “deeply sorry” and does not expect forgiveness. Miss Beverley’s response was unambiguous: the letter left her feeling “nothing but anger.” This Author thinks that entirely reasonable. An apology composed from a prison cell, after twenty years have been handed down by a judge, is the very cheapest currency in circulation.
And finally, a morsel of genuine good news, which This Author offers up with the relief of someone who has been carrying a heavy tray for some distance. Scientists in the Kingdom have successfully trialled, for the first time in patients, a vaccine that requires no refrigeration whatsoever. The tetanus-diphtheria vaccine was converted into a dry powder – inspired, delightfully, by the resurrection plant, which shrivels in drought and springs back to life in rain – kept at room temperature for a full year, then mixed with water and injected into sixty willing volunteers with entirely satisfactory results. Currently, roughly half of all vaccines produced are wasted each year, largely because cold storage fails somewhere along the journey from factory to arm. In the world’s most remote and war-torn regions, this is not a minor inconvenience but a matter of life and death. This Author raises her teacup to the researchers at Southampton. It is not every Thursday that science produces something genuinely worth celebrating, and this, Gentle Reader, is unambiguously one of them.
I am, as ever, your most devoted observer – Lady Whistledown.