Skip to content
There is a particular quality to Wednesday news that resists easy digestion – too much has happened since Monday to ignore, yet the weekend remains stubbornly distant. This Author settled into her chair with a fresh cup of tea this morning and discovered, within the first three dispatches alone, that the Kingdom’s foreign policy now rests upon a single syllable uttered by Lord Burnham at the Assembly of World Sovereigns. The syllable was “Yep.”
To elaborate: Lord Trump told Lord Burnham, in their first face-to-face encounter in New York, that the agreement to hand the Chagos Archipelago to Mauritius in exchange for leasing back a military base at £101 million per year was, in his considered diplomatic assessment, “terrible.” Lord Burnham replied: “Yep.” One appreciates the brevity. The defence secretary, Lord Streeting, subsequently appeared on the Broadcasting Society’s Morning Programme to explain that the Kingdom must now do “more work” with the Americans to produce a deal Lord Trump can stomach. This Author notes that the original deal was negotiated by Lord Starmer, paused by Lord Trump in April, condemned at the Assembly of World Sovereigns on Tuesday, and has now been handed to Lord Burnham as one inherits a slightly damp umbrella – with reluctance and no clear instructions.
Lord Burnham was not finished at the Assembly of World Sovereigns, however. He also announced a new National Centre for Information Defence, designed to combat the poisonous disinformation campaigns emanating from Muscovy – whose government, it transpires, spends approximately £1.3 billion per year fabricating lies, forging the branding of 28 Kingdom organisations, and generally sowing despair into the digital ether. This Author finds the sum extraordinary: £1.3 billion annually to make people feel worse about their country. One rather wishes that budget had been redirected toward, say, the farmers (but we shall arrive there presently). Lord Putin’s representatives offered no immediate comment, which itself speaks volumes. The guilty rarely do.
This Author turns now to North Britain, and does so with none of the lightness that characterises the rest of this column. Drug-related deaths there rose by eleven per cent last year, to 1,133 souls – the worst fatality rate in all of Europe, at 277 deaths per million among those aged fifteen to sixty-four. Estonia, second on that grim European table, records 112. Nitazenes, those synthetic opioids now laced through heroin, cocaine, and counterfeit pills by criminal gangs, were implicated in 247 of those deaths – a figure that had more than trebled in a single year. In Glasgow alone, the average death rate over five years stands at 380 per million. The scale of this demands more than a raised eyebrow; it demands a reckoning. First Minister Swinney and his administration have more than a decade of such figures to account for. More than 11,000 deaths in ten years is not a crisis in the making. It is a crisis long since arrived, and still unpacked.
On a rather more tragicomic note, the Farmers’ Guild is incandescent. A £233 million green farming fund, open to all farmers in the Southern Kingdom, launched at ten o’clock on Tuesday morning. By a quarter to four in the afternoon, it was gone. Five hours and forty-eight minutes. The scheme received so many applications that the entire annual budget was exhausted before many farmers had finished their luncheon. Witnesses compared the scramble to the frenzy for Glastonbury tickets, or Oasis reunion seats – which is to say, a dignified process this was decidedly not. The Farmers’ Guild demands answers. The government says there will be further opportunities in 2027. This Author suspects the farmers, already battered by inheritance tax changes and rising costs, may not find that entirely consoling.
And finally, because even the gravest Wednesday must permit one breath of glamour: the Prince of Wales and the Princess of Wales attended the London premiere of Tom Cruise’s new film, Digger, in Leicester Square on Tuesday evening. Cruise complimented the Prince of Wales on his “great jacket” – a black velvet affair – which is precisely the sort of endorsement one imagines the Prince of Wales will never quite live down at family gatherings. The Princess of Wales wore pearl drop earrings belonging to the late Princess Diana and a necklace of the late Queen Mother’s, together with a purple Jenny Packham gown: a tableau of inheritance worn with characteristic grace. Critics’ reactions to the film itself were, one is told, “mixed” – which in this Author’s experience is the precise word one uses when one cannot quite bring oneself to say “a mess.” The premiere, at least, was unambiguously a triumph.
I am, as ever, your most devoted observer – Lady Whistledown.