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The Meteorological Office tells us that every single month of 2026 has been warmer than average. Every. Single. One. And yet, surveying today’s dispatches, one is forced to conclude that the Kingdom’s capacity for surprise remains entirely undiminished. Blazes. Sewage. A hidden explorer. A warship at the bottom of the North Atlantic. This Author did not expect her Tuesday to feel quite so much like a rehearsal for the apocalypse, but here we are.
We begin with fire, since fire, it seems, is where we are headed whether we choose it or not. Baroness Brown, chairwoman of the Kingdom’s Climate Change Committee, has issued a warning of such stark clarity that even the most oblivious of country house guests could not miss it: lives will be lost, she says, unless far more is done to combat the growing scourge of wildfires. This Author notes, with a raised eyebrow that threatens to become permanent, that this same committee warned of exactly this eventuality back in the year 2012. Fourteen years of warnings. One dead in Gloucestershire this very summer. Nineteen homes ash and rubble in Stourbridge. Villagers fleeing the Cairngorms. And 2026 has just set an all-time record: 1,350 wildfires across the Southern Kingdom alone. The government, in its infinite wisdom, has pledged nearly £100 million towards “national resilience capabilities”. One sincerely hopes that arrives before the next spark does.
From one kind of concealment to another. It has emerged, via the Broadcasting Society’s Newsnight programme, that Sir Ranulph Fiennes – the man described by no less an authority than the Guinness Book of Records as the world’s greatest living explorer – cannot currently be found by his own family. He is 82, diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, and has reportedly been admitted to a series of care homes under assumed names following a rift involving his second wife. His former sister-in-law does not know where he is. His own stepson is seeking to have power of attorney removed from his mother. “He’s not an isolated type of person,” the stepson told the Broadcasting Society, with a grief this Author found genuinely affecting. The man conquered both poles. He deserves rather better than to be hidden from those who love him like a misplaced piece of luggage. Cheshire Constabulary says there are no immediate safeguarding concerns, which is reassuring in the narrowest technical sense, and not reassuring at all in the human one.
For those requiring something rather more pyrotechnic, the War Office obliges magnificently. Off the west coast of North Britain, some 170 miles beyond the Outer Hebrides, the decommissioned American frigate USS Klakring was this past week sent to the bottom of the North Atlantic in a fashion that can only be described as enthusiastic. She was struck by a missile from USS Paul Ignatius, a torpedo from USS Massachusetts, and – as if that were not sufficiently emphatic – “ship-busting” weapons fired from HMS Portland, including a Naval Sea Missile travelling at nearly supersonic speed. The Royal Navy also deployed Sea Venom missiles from a Wildcat helicopter, the first time this has been done against a realistic target. The vessel, forty-three years old and long retired, was apparently cleaned first – out of environmental courtesy – and the area was checked for whales. This Author considers the whales’ relief to have been considerable.
Meanwhile, Tuesday has delivered the peculiar gift of 26 degrees Celsius in late September, with south-east England basking in temperatures some seven degrees above average. The warm air drifts obligingly northward from France and Spain, where it has been doing nothing in particular except baking the Continent. Overnight temperatures may not fall below 20 degrees in parts of the south-east – which, one notes with a thin smile, is precisely the kind of balmy autumn night that the same warming climate producing those 1,350 wildfires is now also manufacturing. The Kingdom is simultaneously too hot and not prepared for heat. This Author finds the irony as warm as the evening air, and twice as oppressive.
And finally, to Cornwall and Devon, where South West Water has been fined a shade under £8 million for six years of illegal sewage spills into the waters of Bodmin, Harlyn, Playing Place, Polperro, and Plymouth. Eighteen charges. The presiding judge called the pollution “horrendous” and “very significant.” The company – with the serene audacity that only a water utility can muster – issued an apology for “what happened in the past,” as though the past were a vague rumour rather than a documented sequence of deliberate discharges between 2015 and 2021. It has promised £760 million in future investment and claims spills are down 17 per cent. This Author is delighted to hear it, and notes only that celebrating a 17 per cent reduction in illegal sewage is rather like a dining establishment boasting that it now only occasionally poisons its guests. Progress, of a sort.
I am, as ever, your most devoted observer – Lady Whistledown.