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There is a particular cruelty in a Monday that arrives bearing not one grave matter but several, each demanding the full weight of this Author’s attention before the morning’s second cup of tea has been attempted. Graves, one might say, do not keep to a schedule. Neither, it seems, does injustice.
We begin with a finding that ought to silence a certain species of commentator rather permanently. Professor Fonagy, clinical psychologist and adviser to National Health Society England, has declared in no uncertain terms that the young are not, as many a drawing-room wit has smugly insisted, “snowflakes.” His independent review – commissioned nine months ago by Lord Streeting after that minister suggested young people were over-diagnosed and, rather chillingly, “written off” – will conclude that one in four sixteen-to-twenty-four-year-olds is now struggling with genuine mental distress. Anxiety, depression, self-harm, eating disorders: these are not the affectations of a pampered generation but the symptoms of an era that is, as the Professor puts it with admirable plainness, simply “harder to be young” in. The digital salons, the economic uncertainty, the sense that the future has been quietly mortgaged – this Author raises no eyebrow at the young. She reserves it entirely for those who told them to pull themselves together.
From the matter of those not heard, to those who have spoken and still await justice. Survivors of the Oxford grooming gang have told the Broadcasting Society’s Panorama programme something that should make every person in authority sit very still indeed: they believe hundreds of their abusers remain free, walking the streets of the city, encountered in shops, petrol stations, restaurants. “Everywhere you can imagine,” says one survivor, known only as Sarah, who was abused and plied with heroin from the age of eleven. Three men were eventually jailed for abusing her in 2020, after she testified against them in court. Three. More than two decades of suffering, and three convictions. An ex-detective who led the original investigation concurs that hundreds of perpetrators have never faced justice. The government has now launched a national inquiry. This Author hopes, with every fibre of her being, that it proves rather more energetic than the response that preceded it.
On the matter of justice for survivors: Lord Starmer has announced that specialist courts to handle rape and sexual offence cases will be rolled out across the Southern Kingdom over the next two years. Each crown court will have at least one dedicated courtroom, with victims able to give evidence remotely, via private entrances, and with waiting rooms separated from defendants. The measure is, charities say, a significant step forward – though they note, with the weary precision of those who have waited very long indeed, that a mere 2.8% of rape offences recorded by police led to prosecutions in the year ending March 2024. One does not wish to be ungenerous about progress. But when five in every six victims do not even report their assault – many fearing the process will be humiliating – one rather wonders whether a new waiting room, however tastefully appointed, will suffice on its own.
This Author pauses, before proceeding to lighter matters, to mark the passing of Kenneth Hay of Upminster, Normandy veteran, ambassador for the British Normandy Memorial, and a man who survived capture by the German 12th SS Panzer Division, a thousand-mile forced march through eastern Europe, and years of labour in a Polish coal mine – only to spend his remaining decades cheerfully educating schoolchildren about courage and resilience, who called him, with great affection, “Grandad Ken.” He died on Sunday, aged 101. There are lives that make the present moment feel rather small by comparison. His was one of them.
And now, because this Author is constitutionally incapable of concluding on solemnity alone, she turns with some relief to Cumbria, where the World Gurning Championships were held this weekend at the Egremont Crab Fair – an institution dating, with magnificent indifference to modernity, to the year 1267. One Ged Eccles, a local man who has practised pulling the most grotesque facial contortions possible in front of a mirror for three to four hours each day since the end of May, finally claimed the men’s championship title. He has been working towards this moment, in a manner of speaking, since he was junior champion in 1985. Television actor Will Mellor – known to readers of the popular dramatic programme about the Royal Post Office scandal – came a creditable second. Mr Eccles described himself as “ecstatic.” This Author, who has spent a Monday absorbing reports on mental health crises, grooming gang survivors, and justice delayed for decades, finds in Mr Eccles’s four-hours-daily commitment to facial grotesquery a certain inexplicable comfort. Dedication, in whatever form it takes, is not nothing.
I am, as ever, your most devoted observer – Lady Whistledown.