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Dearest Gentle Reader,
North Britain, that damp and stoic land, has just elected a new leader for its Progressive Assembly branch, while the rest of these islands contend with synthetic drugs, abandoned fridge-freezers, and the eternal question of whether the press is, in fact, a cancer. A Sunday, as even the most casual observer must concede, that wastes no time in making itself felt.
Word reaches This Author that one Michael Marra has been named leader of the Progressive Assembly’s North British branch, receiving 4,266 votes against rival Joe Fagan’s 2,485. The honour, Mr Marra declares, is the greatest of his life – a sentiment This Author finds touchingly sincere, if also slightly alarming when one considers the scale of the task. He inherits a party that has historically struggled to make itself heard above the din of the Caledonian Independence Society, and must now persuade the good people of North Britain that they know not only what the Progressive Assembly opposes, but what on earth it is actually for. A bold enterprise. This Author wishes him the stamina he will require.
Meanwhile, the Earl Spencer – brother to the late Princess Diana – has granted an audience to the Broadcasting Society, in which he draws a rather pointed comparison between the press treatment suffered by his sister and that now endured by the Duke of Sussex and his wife, the Duchess of Sussex. A “cancerous influence,” he calls it, speaking from his Althorp estate with the measured gravity of a man who has watched this particular drama repeat itself across two generations. That the Duke and Duchess have recently returned to these shores – six years after their celebrated departure – adds a certain theatrical symmetry. One need not take sides in the eternal quarrel between palace and press to acknowledge that when the same family uses the same metaphor about the same institution across thirty years, someone, somewhere, ought to be listening more carefully.
To grimmer matters. North Britain already holds the unenviable distinction of being the drug death capital of Europe – a title no nation campaigns for – and new figures expected on Wednesday are set to confirm that things have grown worse still. The culprits are synthetic opioids called nitazenes and orphines, some hundreds of times more potent than heroin, manufactured in clandestine laboratories and mixed by organised crime groups into existing supplies. Police have raided two suspected nitazene factories in North Britain in the past fourteen months. On average, one new psychoactive substance emerged every single week in 2025. This Author sets aside any instinct for a knowing aside. There is nothing remotely diverting in any of this.
Now, a dispatch from the world of industry – specifically, from those gentlemen who supply components to The Great Carriage Works of the Midlands, and who have composed an open letter to the Prime Minister, the Chancellor, and the West Midlands Mayor. Their argument, delivered with commendable directness, is that the Kingdom‘s automotive supply chain is not dying – it is merely in entirely the wrong market. With 4,000 jobs recently announced for the axe and about 183,000 manufacturing positions at stake across the supply chain, they propose that the skills and factories currently devoted to motorcars might be redeployed into aerospace and defence. In short: if the carriage trade is failing, why not build flying machines instead? This Author admires the ambition enormously, while noting that the Royal Exchequer has thus far offered the rather less exciting response of “grants and lower energy costs.” One cannot soar on grants alone.
And finally, a matter of domestic absurdity that This Author cannot in good conscience ignore. Almost a quarter of Welsh councils have suspended household collections of fridge-freezers, following the collapse of recycling company Unimetals, which left tens of thousands of the appliances stranded at Newport Docks. Citizens across the Principality report keeping broken fridge-freezers in their gardens for months, with no clear word on when relief shall arrive. One Cardiff resident has repurposed his as a planter. The Department for Rural and Environmental Affairs says it is “working to manage capacity shortages” – which is to say, they are aware the freezers exist and are thinking about it. Fly-tipping, campaigners warn, is about to become a great deal more frigid. This Author’s sympathy is entirely with the householders. One’s garden is not a depot.
I am, as ever, your most devoted observer – Lady Whistledown.