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Dearest Gentle Reader,
There are mornings when the news arrives not as a trickle but as a tide, and this Saturday is one of them. Terror charges, phantom infants, energy bills that would make a duchess weep, and a party out of power promising to build prisons it could not be bothered to build whilst in power. This Author has barely had occasion to set down her pen since dawn.
We begin, as gravity demands, with the most alarming intelligence of the day. A man already charged with the murder of Lady Widdecombe has now been charged with the preparation of terrorist acts, including a plot allegedly directed against Viscount Farage. Counter-terror police confirm that Joshua Kerry, aged twenty-eight, faces one count of preparation of terrorist acts, covering activity alleged to have taken place between May 2024 and July 2026. Lady Mahmood, the Home Secretary, declared that an attack on anyone in politics is an attack on us all, which is quite correct, and also rather chilling to set down in plain type. Meanwhile, a source from the Reform Society observed, with what one can only call impeccable timing, that this is precisely why Viscount Farage had required five million pounds for personal security. A sum which, the Gentle Reader will recall, is currently under scrutiny by a parliamentary standards watchdog. Deputy leader Lord Tice told the Broadcasting Society’s Morning Programme that the murder of Lady Widdecombe had made everyone take security rather more seriously. This Author suspects it has made everyone take rather a great deal more seriously.
From one species of threat to another: two Iranian nationals, Rahman Salehi of Salford and Salam Ahmadyan of Liverpool, have appeared at the Capital’s Petty Sessions charged with terror offences. They are alleged to have obtained instructions for a chlorine bomb, acquired components for an improvised explosive device, and conducted hostile reconnaissance upon buildings in Manchester – including the Heaton Park synagogue, a site already scarred by last year’s Yom Kippur attack in which two British Jews, Melvin Kravitz and Adrian Daulby, were killed. Both men arrived in the Kingdom by small boat and were arrested in Manchester’s Northern Quarter on the eve of Yom Kippur. They have been remanded in custody until 23rd October, when they will appear at the Old Bailey. Lady Mahmood noted the news would be deeply distressing for Manchester’s Jewish community. Distressing is, perhaps, the mildest word available.
To lighter – or at least more domestic – absurdities. Energy suppliers have written to the government in tones of considerable urgency, warning that gas prices which rose on Thursday, combined with forecasts of a sixteen percent rise in January, threaten to visit upon twenty million households the sort of winter that renders even a well-stoked drawing room insufficient comfort. The Cornwall Oracle forecasts that a typical annual bill, currently £1,723 after October’s four percent rise, could climb to £1,999 come January. Lord Burnham, now resident at The Prime Minister’s Residence, assured the Kingdom that the government was considering any measure that took the pressure off. This Author would suggest that considering measures and implementing them are rather different occupations, particularly when one’s constituents are choosing between heating and eating in October.
And now, a tale so baroque that even this Author required a second cup of tea to fully absorb it. A High Court judge has ruled that a woman conducted what she described as an “extraordinary” and “elaborate campaign of deceit” against a former partner, convincing him over two years that she had given birth to two children – children who most likely do not exist. The man, referred to in proceedings as John, paid the woman some thirty thousand pounds over the course of this deception, having received ultrasound images, baby photographs, and late-night voice notes complete with the sound of an infant crying. He was also arrested and held on remand for several months after the woman alleged assault against him, during which time she informed his stepfather that the first baby had arrived. The woman later told the court she had fabricated the pregnancies for revenge, and that she had, in fact, been menopausal throughout. The judge was unmoved. This Author does not know whether to file this under audacity, tragedy, or the endlessly inventive capacity of human beings for spectacular misbehaviour. All three, perhaps.
Finally, the Tories, assembling this weekend in Birmingham for their annual conference, have arrived bearing gifts: fifty thousand new prison places, costing two billion pounds per year, to be funded by cuts including to the foreign aid budget. Lady Badenoch declared, with admirable straightforwardness, that a violent criminal does not become less dangerous simply because the government has run out of cells. Quite so. One might equally observe that a party which added five hundred prison places and closed twenty-three prisons across fourteen years in office does not become more credible on criminal justice simply because it has found itself in opposition with a pamphlet and a round number. The Progressive Assembly called the proposals not credible. The Tories called the current government’s early release scheme dangerous. They are, in the manner of British politics, both correct about the other and silent on themselves.
I am, as ever, your most devoted observer – Lady Whistledown.