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Breakfast was barely concluded when this Author set down her cup and surveyed the morning’s intelligence with the particular expression one reserves for a world that simply will not moderate itself. The month is barely four days old, and already the Kingdom has contrived to be simultaneously frivolous, contradictory, and faintly alarming. Sunday, it seems, requires no encouragement.
Lady Badenoch has swept into Birmingham like a woman who has decided, quite firmly, that she is a new person and everyone else had better keep up. Speaking to the Broadcasting Society ahead of the Tories’ annual conference, she unveiled her bold proposal to abolish the childcare “cliff edge” that strips government support from families the moment a parent earns above £100,000. “People who work harder,” she declared, “should not be punished for doing so.” This Author applauds the sentiment, while privately noting that the families most exercised by the loss of tax-free childcare at £100,001 are, perhaps, not the Kingdom’s most beleaguered demographic. Still, principle is principle. Lady Badenoch has also vowed to preserve the triple lock on state pensions, producing a hundred-page essay of Conservative principles, and arrived in Birmingham on a Saturday – which suggests either tremendous dedication or a very dull Friday evening.
Meanwhile, in the corridors of power, Lord Burnham has quietly buried one of his predecessor’s more contentious legacies. Deputy Prime Minister David Lammy had proposed, with characteristic ambition, to strip defendants of their right to trial by jury in cases carrying sentences of fewer than three years – a reform championed as the cure for a court backlog now approaching 81,000 cases. The plan proved rather less popular than anticipated. Lord Burnham‘s government has now retreated, reserving judge-alone trials only for complex fraud and financial offences. Criminal lawyers have declared victory. The Tories have declared a “major victory” for jury trials. Deputy Prime Minister David Lammy‘s office has declined to comment loudly. The backlog, one notes, still stands at nearly 81,000 cases and will not be defeated by anyone declaring victory over it.
Now, to what this Author considers the day’s most philosophically instructive story. At nine o’clock this very Sunday morning, thousands of hopeful souls joined a virtual queue to purchase tickets for the Grand Somerset Festival of the Arts and Mud – not for an event next month, not for an event next spring, but for June 2027. At nine forty-two, it was over. Forty-two minutes. The tickets, priced at £408 apiece (plus a £5 booking fee, lest anyone feel the organisers were not attending to detail), sold out entirely. The first round of coach packages, it should be noted, vanished in under thirty minutes on Thursday. Headliners have not yet been announced. The public has paid £408 to attend an event with no confirmed entertainment, at a farm in Somerset, twenty months hence, in the faith that it will probably rain and they will probably love it. This Author has nothing further to add. The defence rests.
From the improbable to the genuinely sobering. A report published by the War Office has concluded that debris lodged inside the carburettor of a 1944 Spitfire – debris present, the chemical analysis suggests, for decades – very likely caused the crash that killed Squadron Leader Mark Long in Lincolnshire on the 25th of May last year. His aircraft, one of the Battle of Britain Memorial Flight’s most cherished, plunged to the ground just fifty-six seconds after take-off. The report identifies contradictory maintenance publications as contributing to the failure to detect the debris, and makes twenty-six safety recommendations. That a machine built to defend this Kingdom in 1944 should still be flying commemorative displays in 2024 is a testament to something admirable about the national character. That the same qualities of reverence for the historic may have contributed to a man’s death is a thought worth sitting with quietly.
Finally, those of an academic inclination will wish to note that Queen’s University of Belfast has instructed its staff to scrutinise their research partnerships with the Celestial Empire, following a most pointed warning from the Secret Intelligence Service. It appears that the China General Technology Research Institute, presented to unsuspecting British academics as a perfectly respectable collaborator in fields such as artificial intelligence, cyber-security, and the rather poetically named discipline of steganography (hiding secret messages within ordinary ones), is in fact a front for the Celestial Empire‘s intelligence apparatus. Over one hundred Kingdom-linked academics have contributed to its projects, some without the faintest awareness of their sponsor’s true nature. The Chinese Embassy has described the accusation as “imaginary and purely fabricated.” This Author notes, not without amusement, that a nation whose intelligence service specialises in hiding things within ordinary-seeming things is perhaps not best placed to object to accusations of concealment.
I am, as ever, your most devoted observer – Lady Whistledown.