Dearest Gentle Reader,
This Author confesses that Wednesday has once again arrived with the quiet menace of a determined debt-collector. One had barely settled into the morning when the news presented itself in such startling variety that a stronger constitution than this Author’s own might have been required. Pray, read on.
Two men have been arrested this very Wednesday in connection with the most vile and cowardly of acts: the deliberate torching of four ambulances belonging to Hatzola, a Jewish charity providing free emergency care to the north Capital community regardless of faith. The vehicles were set ablaze in Golders Green in the small hours of Monday, in what the Metropolitan Constabulary is treating as an antisemitic hate crime. A gentleman of 47 was apprehended in north-west London, another of 45 in central London – though counter-terror officers note that Metropolitan Constabulary CCTV suggests at least three persons were involved. One wonders what particular species of wickedness leads a man to set fire to an ambulance, but This Author suspects the answer is not a flattering one. The Constabulary called the arrests an “important breakthrough”; the community, one imagines, would settle for nothing less than the whole despicable party behind bars.
Meanwhile, in Margate, a hospital finds itself in the most uncomfortable of positions: accused not of incompetence in treatment, but of a two-day silence during a meningitis outbreak that has, as of Monday, claimed two young lives and left four more souls in intensive care. The Crown Health Security Agency was only alerted on the afternoon of Friday 13th March – despite the first patient having arrived at the Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother Hospital on the Wednesday evening prior. The law, Gentle Reader, requires immediate notification upon suspicion alone; one need not await a laboratory’s confirmation before reaching for the pen. Of the 22 suspected and probable cases – all teenagers and young adults – ten reported developing symptoms in that fateful two-day window. The hospital has admitted it “missed an opportunity.” This Author has heard more contrite confessions from gentlemen caught cheating at cards.
And now, Gentle Reader, a story that demands one set down one’s cup entirely. In January 2023, a patient named Nathan Newby – being treated at a Leeds hospital for a chest infection, of all the mundane afflictions – noticed a hospital worker behaving with peculiar anxiety outside the maternity ward. What he discovered, upon introducing himself with the cheerful audacity of a man who has not yet processed the gravity of the situation, was a pressure cooker bomb containing ten kilogrammes of explosives: estimated to be double the size of the device used in the 2013 Boston Marathon attack. Mr Newby spent two hours – two hours, Gentle Reader – in conversation with the would-be bomber, eventually persuading him to step away from the ward. He even offered the man a hug. The bomber, Mohammad Farooq, was subsequently convicted of preparing acts of terrorism and sentenced to a minimum of 37 years. Mr Newby will receive the George Medal. This Author, who considers retrieving a dropped fan from beneath a ballroom chair a feat of considerable bravery, has nothing further to add.
Finally, to Canterbury, where this very afternoon Dame Mullally is to be enthroned as the first female Archbishop of Canterbury in the Church of England’s history – a lineage stretching back to St Augustine in 597 AD, comprising 105 archbishops, each one of them a gentleman. Dame Mullally was a nurse for over two decades, becoming the youngest-ever chief nursing officer for England in 1999, before her ordination in 2002 and her appointment as the first female Bishop of London in 2018. In a gesture of admirable fortitude, she walked nearly 90 miles over six days on pilgrimage from St Paul’s Cathedral to Canterbury Cathedral in preparation. The Prince of Wales and Princess of Wales will represent His Majesty the King in the congregation. Among the 2,000 guests: nurses and carers, invited in honour of her former vocation. It is, by any measure, a most historic afternoon – and proof, if any were still needed, that the grandest of glass ceilings may yet yield to sufficient persistence and rather good walking shoes.
I am, as ever, your most devoted observer – Lady Whistledown.