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Dearest Gentle Reader,
A police officer shot in the small hours, a toddler’s final moments spent in a hospital corridor, and a party leader who cannot overturn his own party’s policy until the year 2028: this is what Sunday has laid at This Author’s door. Let us not pretend otherwise, and let us not reach for levity where none belongs.
In the city of Nottingham, in the early hours of this very morning, a police officer was shot after approaching two suspects in Angel Row. He is now in hospital, treated for a wound to his foot, while a man and a woman remain at large. A firearm was recovered. The scene remains closed. This Author trusts the Nottinghamshire Constabulary will move with all haste, and extends every good wish to the injured officer and his family. There is nothing arch to be said here, only that the courage required to approach two unknown suspects before five in the morning is a kind of bravery this column will never cease to admire.
Then to the matter of little Finlay Roberts, two years old, who spent his final hours of life in a crowded hospital corridor, clinging to his father while slowly dying. Lady Cooper, the Health Secretary, appeared before the Broadcasting Society this morning and declared, with commendable firmness, that no child should be treated in a corridor – a statement so obviously correct that it ought never to have been necessary. She has asked National Health Society England to draw up urgent plans to end what is called “corridor care” for children. One notes, with the mildest of raised eyebrows, that the number of people waiting more than twelve hours in accident and emergency departments from decision to admit to actually being admitted stood at 50,582 in September alone – up from 44,951 in August. This Author does not require a mathematician to identify the direction of travel.
To the Verdant Society now, where Sir Polanski appeared this morning in a state of studied serenity to inform the nation that he cannot, will not, and indeed by the party’s own rules must not, overturn the conference motion declaring Zionism to be racist – not until 2028, at the very earliest. The motion, passed by 1,022 votes to 813, represents the considered democratic verdict of a small fraction of the party’s 230,000 members. Sir Polanski says he respects the democratic will of those members. He also says he would have voted against the motion without amendments. He also says he cannot change the rules. This Author has encountered fewer contradictions in a game of parlour chess, and the game there is at least concluded in an evening rather than dragged through to the end of the decade.
From the sublime to the alarming: the Reform Society finds itself in characteristically turbulent waters after an undercover documentary by the rival news organ captured a party activist declaring that one cannot be Muslim and British – an opinion he apparently offered freely and without evident embarrassment. The gentleman in question has been suspended while investigations proceed. Yet more arresting were two Reform Society councillors in the London borough of Hounslow, one of whom advocated machine-gunning thousands of grooming gang members, and the other of whom proposed conducting Sunday morning executions in the rose garden of the Prime Minister’s Residence. The latter gentleman told the Broadcasting Society this was a “perfectly legitimate opinion”. This Author – who takes her Sunday mornings with tea and a pamphlet, not firing squads – begs most respectfully to differ.
Finally, a note of both alarm and admiration: the actor and comedian Paul Whitehouse, 68, was set upon by a miscreant at a cash machine behind a grand grocery emporium in Islington on Friday evening, having ventured out solely to collect medication for his unwell wife. He fought back. He retrieved his card. The perpetrator fled empty-handed. His wife posted the account to her Portrait Gallery page at her husband’s own urging, so that others might remain vigilant. This Author salutes the spirit thoroughly. The gentleman who plays Argus Filch in the forthcoming grand wizarding television entertainment, it turns out, is rather harder to rob than one might suppose.
I am, as ever, your most devoted observer – Lady Whistledown.