Skip to content
Thirty-three. That is the number of British souls, the youngest a girl of thirteen, who are unaccounted for in the mountains near the Nepal-Tibet border, buried somewhere beneath the mud and silence of a catastrophic flash flood. Two hundred and seventy bodies have been recovered; 826 people remain missing in total. A group of twelve Britons, booked on a tour to Mount Kailash with the Alpine Expedition Company, have not been reachable since early morning, when their guides last made contact at a quarter to nine. The Foreign Office is working with Nepalese authorities; Lord Burnham has offered £5 million in relief funds and urged those in the region to follow local guidance. Rescue helicopters cannot fly. The conditions will not permit it. This Author sets down her pen and simply hopes.
Closer to home, the communities of Grangetown and South Bank, near Middlesbrough, have endured a week of devastating losses. Seven people, among them PC Blades and PC Clough, perished in a car crash on Saturday. Then, on Wednesday, a thirty-four-year-old woman and a seven-year-old girl died in a house fire. Nine souls lost in seven days in the same small corner of the Kingdom. The council leader has called an urgent summit of councillors, police, and housing providers. Lord Burnham called it “utterly devastating” and pledged all necessary support. Several arrests have been made. The people of Grangetown deserve to feel safe in their own homes; that they must be reassured of this most elementary right is, in itself, a sombre verdict on something much larger.
Now, Gentle Reader, to a story of genuine marvel, lest this dispatch become entirely too grave to survive. At the great hospital of University College London, one Rhys Hibbert, a father of two from Bedfordshire, has become the world’s first patient to undergo live artificial intelligence-assisted brain surgery. His eleven-millimetre tumour, nestled perilously close to his optic nerves and carotid arteries, has been successfully removed. The AI tool watched the operation as it proceeded and advised surgeons in real time on how to navigate the hidden vessels and nerves within his skull. “There are no road signs inside our head,” said Mr Hibbert, with admirable understatement. He is forty-eight years old, a man whose principal motivation for surviving the ordeal was, he confided, the unbroken eighteen-year habit of rising each morning to make his wife a cup of coffee. Machines guiding scalpels, coffee as a reason for living: this is the modern age in full, and This Author cannot quite decide whether to applaud or reach for the smelling salts.
Meanwhile, Lord Burnham is conducting what his spokespeople describe, with admirable earnestness, as a “listening tour.” On this particular Thursday, he found himself in south Wales, speaking to workers and apprentices about reindustrialisation and the cost of living. He has also announced a summit in October at which the first ministers of the Principality, North Britain, and the Northern Province shall convene at the National Economic Council to discuss “good jobs in every community.” A noble ambition. One notes that Lord Burnham, who assumed the premiership from Lord Starmer in July following the Makerfield by-election, appears constitutionally incapable of remaining in one location for more than forty-eight hours. A listening tour that spans every corner of the Kingdom, one supposes, is at least thorough, if somewhat punishing on the travelling staff.
And finally, should any of the Gentle Readership find themselves wakeful in the small hours of Friday morning – which, given the thunderstorms presently battering much of England and Wales courtesy of the Meteorological Office‘s yellow warnings, seems entirely possible – do look to the south-western sky at approximately 03:33. The full moon, which astronomers have inexplicably christened the Sturgeon Moon, will begin its transformation into what the excitable press calls a Blood Moon, as 93% of it slides into the darkest part of the Earth’s shadow by 05:12. It will hang low, look enormous, and glow a disconcerting red. All of this, mere days after the Duke of Sussex and Duchess of Sussex quietly landed in Birmingham, dogs Mia and Pula in tow (the chickens, one is gravely informed, remain in California), and decamped to a private property in the Cotswolds to begin their new chapter as non-working royals. A blood-red moon over the Cotswolds on the Sussexes’ first full night back on British soil. This Author would not have arranged it differently if she had tried.
I am, as ever, your most devoted observer – Lady Whistledown.