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To those among the Gentle Readership who had hoped that Monday might pass without its customary parade of constitutional upheaval, culinary legislation, and footballing injustice: This Author is sorry to report that Monday has not obliged. There is, in fact, rather a great deal to discuss.
We begin with the machines, since they are once again demanding attention. A cross-party committee of MPs and peers, working across both chambers of the Grand Assembly, has published a hundred-page report concluding what many of us suspected: that nobody, anywhere on earth, has any idea how to govern artificial intelligence. The Joint Committee on Human Rights calls for a new bill, a single independent oversight body, and the outright prohibition of certain uses of the technology, including the creation of sexualised images of women and girls without consent, and the scanning of faces without permission. One notes with grim amusement that it has taken a hundred pages to arrive at conclusions which most people of ordinary conscience might reach in a paragraph. Still, thoroughness is a virtue, and This Author commends the effort, if not the urgency with which it was apparently not undertaken sooner.
From the great questions of the age to the rather more immediate question of what the nation’s children shall eat for luncheon. The Department for Learning has announced what it calls the biggest shake-up to school dinners in over a decade: deep-fried food is banned, cake is rationed to twice weekly in secondary schools and once in primary, processed meats are reduced to a single appearance per week, and every sweet dessert must now be accompanied by fruit. The reforms arrive in 2027, funded, we are assured, from existing budgets, which is rather like announcing a grand renovation of the parlour whilst confirming that one has not actually acquired any new furniture. The head teachers’ association welcomed the changes but asked, with admirable restraint, that the rules not become yet another instrument with which to beat them. A reasonable request. The chips, it appears, are down in every sense.
Meanwhile, at The Prime Minister’s Residence, Lord Burnham hosted a most distinguished assembly of chief executives – from BP, Shell, HSBC, Morrisons, Sainsbury’s, Rolls-Royce, and several others – to deliver the bracing message that the Kingdom requires a “culture shift” in how it does business. One might observe that summoning the captains of industry to Number 10 for a pep talk is itself rather a cultural artefact, and that the Chancellor Lord Healey preparing his first Budget next month lends the gathering a certain urgency that no amount of encouraging rhetoric can fully disguise. Separately, more than eight hundred pub, restaurant and hotel proprietors have written to Lord Burnham requesting that the hospitality VAT rate be reduced from twenty per cent to ten. Celebrity chefs signed. Desperation, one notes, has many signatures.
For sheer historical delight, however, nothing in today’s dispatches rivals the treasures unearthed during the £369 million refurbishment of The Palace. Workers have discovered, secreted beneath floorboards and embedded in brick: a pair of hobnailed boots, several betting slips, an empty Silk Cut cigarette carton, a bottle of Schweppes spring water, and – most gloriously – a ticket for a whist drive hosted by The Palace on 14 April 1949. There was also a newspaper cutting about the Great Train Robbers, and a typed schedule revealing that the late Queen Elizabeth II had planned to work the room at a 1977 diplomatic reception in a strictly “clockwise direction”. One finds this last detail entirely marvellous. Order, discipline, and excellent spatial planning: the qualities that built an empire, and apparently governed a drinks reception.
And finally, to the theatre of association football, where the refereeing body Pro Ref has, with remarkable candour, admitted an “error of judgement” in allowing Erling Haaland’s winning goal to stand in Manchester City’s derby victory over Manchester United at Old Trafford. The goal, scored in the sixtieth minute, was initially ruled offside, then awarded after the video assistant referee intervened, on the basis that a United player’s boot had played Haaland onside. What was not considered, it transpires, was whether the offside Enzo Fernandez – lurking centrally and diving at the ball – was interfering with play. The match had already seen Phil Foden dismissed for kicking United captain Bruno Fernandes, which is to say that the entire affair was conducted in the spirit of operatic chaos from the first whistle. United’s defenders called it an injustice. The referee’s body agreed, after the final whistle. Timing, as this column has observed before of matters both great and small, is everything.
I am, as ever, your most devoted observer – Lady Whistledown.