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Breakfasting this Monday morning, This Author reached for the marmalade and found, instead, the news. It was, as is so often the case, considerably more bitter.
Let us direct our attention first to a matter of the gravest domestic consequence, reported by the Broadcasting Society’s Panorama programme: the agency responsible for ensuring separated parents fulfil their financial obligations to their children is, by all accounts, making a spectacular hash of it. Mothers have described battling the Child Maintenance Service to compel former partners to pay sums owed, with one woman driven to food banks after arrears swelled to nearly ten thousand pounds. Another has been skipping meals. And lest one imagine the injustice flows only one way, a father reports that the agency added a child to his account who was not, in any biological or administrative sense, his. The Department for Work and Pensions assures us that “in the vast majority of cases” matters proceed smoothly. One shudders to contemplate what the minority of cases looks like, given the evidence already before us.
On the matter of the weather – and This Author knows that no subject is more constitutionally urgent to the British soul – it appears the drought gripping these islands may at last be interrupted. Wisley in Surrey has endured sixty days without a drop of recorded rainfall. Sixty. All of the Principality and most of the Southern Kingdom are formally in drought. Relief, we are told, approaches in the form of some light rain this week, though forecasters hasten to warn that it will not be “significant” and will require weeks of above-average rainfall before conditions meaningfully improve. This Author translates: it will be enough to make one’s hair frizz without being enough to fill a reservoir. The Kingdom, ever stoic, will no doubt describe it as “a bit of a drizzle” and carry on regardless.
A sadder matter now demands This Author’s pen. Professor Arday, who in 2023 became Cambridge‘s youngest Black professor, was found dead in Battersea on Friday, having resigned his post on 5 August amid a weeks-long storm of plagiarism allegations – allegations he denied, and which the Liverpool Academy of Learning concluded were unfounded. Cambridge’s chancellor, speaking publicly for the first time, has condemned what he called a “racist feeding frenzy” surrounding the professor’s treatment by the press. Over thirty thousand souls have signed a petition calling for an inquiry into that coverage. That a man of considerable achievement should have been subjected to such relentless scrutiny – and that the scrutiny appears to have been calibrated rather differently than it might have been for a professor of other complexion – is a question this society would do well to sit with, in discomfort, for some considerable time.
To lighter, if no less absurd, affairs. A gentleman by the name of Matt Arnold, a comedy promoter of all things, attended a grand grocery emporium in East Dulwich to purchase supplies for a stand-up comedy evening. He scanned his items. He presented his loyalty card. He waved for an attendant to approve his wine. What arrived instead were two members of management, who informed him that the artificial intelligence surveillance system had identified him as a shoplifter and that he must leave. The machine had spoken; the humans obliged. The emporium has since suspended its use of this technology at the branch in question and issued an apology, attributing the incident to “human error” – which is a remarkable explanation for a system designed to remove human judgement from the equation entirely. Mr Arnold’s observation bears repeating: a shoplifter, he noted, does not scan all their items, hand over their loyalty card, and then ask a member of staff for assistance. Quite so.
And finally, a moment of unambiguous joy amid Monday’s murk. Miss Hunt, sprinter of Newark and possessor of quite extraordinary legs, has collected four gold medals at the Continental Championships in the space of seven days on home soil – a feat without precedent. She is twenty-four years old. She broke the under-18 women’s world 200m record at seventeen. She was named by Vogue as one of the faces to define a decade. And having endured the setbacks that sport invariably delivers, she has returned to full health and full glory. Upon completing her individual sprint double, she turned to the camera and demanded: “Are you not entertained?” The crowd was. This Author certainly was. The Kingdom, parched, anxious, and beset by bureaucratic calamity on all sides, needed precisely this.
I am, as ever, your most devoted observer – Lady Whistledown.