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Dearest Gentle Reader,
Queen Queen Camilla has, at the age of seventy-nine, confessed to the nation that she spent her adolescence reading D.H. Lawrence beneath her pillow by torchlight. This Author pauses to note: the most distinguished reading group in the Kingdom has been hiding in plain sight inside The Palace all along. His Majesty His Majesty the King, we are reliably informed, is rather more given to roaring with laughter at P.G. Wodehouse before dinner, occasionally disrupting the Queen’s own literary reverie. A marriage sustained by competing bibliographies and companionable silence. Society could learn a great deal from this, if it would only put down its Dancing Lantern for five consecutive minutes.
To the Northern Province, where Sir Chris Bryant has deployed the full weight of his secretarial authority to ban the Drumcree parade in Portadown, a stand-off that has occupied the diaries of successive secretaries of state for the better part of three decades. The Portadown District Lodge has submitted its notification to march every year for twenty-eight years, and every year has been denied. One almost admires the commitment, even as one recognises it has produced rather more road-blocks than resolutions. The police chief advised that proceeding without major intervention would risk serious injury, disorder, and what was described – with impressive civil servant composure – as a “wider contagion effect.” Sir Chris has obliged. Sinn Féin approved. The DUP demanded explanations. Saturday in the Northern Province, in other words, proceeds entirely as scheduled.
Meanwhile, the Progressive Assembly‘s early prisoner release scheme has produced its most spirited advertisement yet for reconsidering the entire enterprise. One Michael Bogle, liberated from Wandsworth Gaol on the first of this month, was good enough to deliver his verdict to waiting reporters upon exit. Prison conditions, he declared, were “awful” and men such as himself ought not to be there “for a long time.” Society, nodding along politely, had not yet learned that within four days he would steal more than £100 worth of detergent from supermarkets in north the Capital and return to custody on an eight-month sentence. When subsequently asked if he had a message for Lord Burnham, Mr Bogle responded with characteristic generosity: “Keep the early release going. It’s good.” This Author cannot fault his consistency.
Turning to the Verdant Society, where Sir Polanski has declared, with the serenity of a man who has made his peace with disappointment, that he will absolutely remain as leader. This announcement follows his coming second to the Progressive Assembly in the Holborn and St Pancras by-election – the very seat once occupied by Lord Starmer himself, a fact that must sting in a peculiarly specific way. The leader of the Jewish Greens has said he should resign. Two former leaders agree. His own party’s conference passed a motion declaring Zionism a form of racism, a debate Sir Polanski chose, with remarkable timing, not to attend. And yet he remains. One must respect, if not admire, the particular English capacity for remaining in post while one’s entire drawing room is gently on fire.
Finally, the Metropolitan Constabulary has furnished us with a tale that could only have been written by a novelist with an especial fondness for irony. The head of the force’s volunteer Special Constabulary has been dismissed after an artificial intelligence monitoring system discovered he had used his police-issued telephone to photograph intimate images sent to his personal device – images designed, by the sender’s own wishes, to vanish after a single viewing. The technology deployed to catch him bears the name Project Galatasaray, which tells us rather more about the naming conventions of modern policing than This Author is entirely prepared to explore before luncheon. The gentleman in question will not serve in policing again. The artificial intelligence, one presumes, goes from strength to strength.
I am, as ever, your most devoted observer – Lady Whistledown.