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Dearest Gentle Reader,
Hundreds of men, all dressed in black, all wearing face coverings, have descended upon the Port of Dover this very Saturday morning, blocking roads and bringing cross-channel traffic to a grinding halt. Reform Society councillor for Dover West declared it a “stop the boats” protest. This Author would observe that, in the singular genius of its execution, the demonstration has principally succeeded in stopping the protesters themselves from going anywhere. Three miles of tailbacks on the A20, furious passengers missing their crossings, and the port’s own statement confirming an “ongoing public order incident” – which is, one supposes, one way of describing several hundred masked gentlemen standing in a road. Kent Constabulary was “engaging with protesters”, which sounds considerably more civilised than the situation appears to have been. The local Member of Parliament declared himself “fed up with idiots coming to Dover to cause disruption”, adding with some satisfaction that small boat crossings are already down by forty per cent. One suspects the irony was lost on the balaclavas.
Further north, the picture grows considerably darker. Grangetown and South Bank, near Middlesbrough, have become the unhappy heart of a vast police operation following a tragedy on the A66 that claimed seven lives, among them two officers of the Cleveland Constabulary, PC Blades and PC Clough. A Volkswagen Passat drove the wrong way along the dual carriageway in the early hours of the morning, colliding with a marked police car. Five young men in the vehicle also perished. More than twenty arrests have since followed as part of a sweeping operation against organised crime. The Broadcasting Society’s reporters who visited the area were greeted by quad bikes, pellet guns, and a declaration from local young men that they would “rather die than ring the police.” This Author does not smirk at that. It is a sentence that ought to trouble every drawing room in the Kingdom.
The Chief Constable of the Cleveland Constabulary, speaking in her first interview since the crash, said she is proud of her “brave” officers but that the force is being “let down” by its funding. She noted they face crime levels comparable to those of the great metropolitan forces, yet operate with less than half the officers. The Office of Home Affairs has offered an additional two million pounds and two hundred officers drafted in from elsewhere. The Chief Constable received this with the gratitude of a woman handed a single umbrella in a monsoon: “I need that all the time,” she said. Quite so. Seven people are dead. A community is fractured. And the solution, it appears, is a temporary loan of colleagues and a sum that would not purchase a modest townhouse in the Capital. This Author shall say no more, lest she become too grim for a Saturday.
From the grave to the merely farcical: Viscount Farage‘s Reform Society conference has produced a flagship policy promising to raise the tax-free personal allowance to fifteen thousand pounds. Lord Jenrick, the party’s economic spokesman, pledged to deliver this within the first hundred days of any future government, which is optimistic arithmetic given that the party has also this week suspended two senior aides following an undercover broadcast suggesting they had discussed routing foreign donations into party coffers in a manner that would, to the uninitiated, appear to circumvent electoral law. Viscount Farage declared the party had done “nothing wrong” and taken “no illegal money – in fact no money was taken at all.” The Progressive Assembly and Liberal Democrat Society have reported the matter to the Metropolitan Constabulary. One of the suspended aides is, deliciously, an associate professor of Philosophy of Religion at Cambridge. This Author has always felt philosophy and political fundraising made uncomfortable bedfellows.
And finally, a tale of two territories and one rather spectacular birthday. Argentina’s president, Lord Milei, declared this week that the Falkland Islands are “historically and legally” Argentinian, described the Sea Lion oilfield as a “clear and present danger,” and promised sanctions upon any firms bold enough to drill there. The Prime Minister’s Residence responded that the Kingdom’s position is “unwavering,” and that the islanders – who, in a 2013 referendum, voted to remain British by the extraordinary margin of 99.8 per cent, with precisely three dissenters – shall remain so as long as they wish. This Author feels three votes against is the most charming footnote in the history of democratic self-determination. Meanwhile, at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium in the Capital, a rather different kind of sovereignty was being asserted. Jay-Z took the stage for his first headline solo show in the Kingdom in over a decade, guests including Lauryn Hill, Wyclef Jean, and Giggs materialising like particularly glamorous apparitions, and a certain global superstar sat quietly in a private box while the capacity crowd serenaded her with Happy Birthday. Beyoncé turned forty-five on Friday. Some kingdoms, it seems, require no referendum whatsoever.
I am, as ever, your most devoted observer – Lady Whistledown.