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Breakfasting this morning, This Author paused over her kedgeree to read of a Bradford solicitor who had devised a scheme so brazen, so magnificently impudent, that one’s toast went quite cold in admiration before the horror set in. Mohammad Alias Yousaf – known, with suspicious cosiness, simply as Alias – was secretly filmed by the Broadcasting Society explaining to an undercover reporter how a £45,000 illegal-working fine might simply… disappear. The trick? Find someone abroad willing to declare themselves the owner of one’s mini-mart. Elegant. Diabolical. Entirely the sort of scheme one reads about and cannot quite believe was offered over a desk and not in a penny dreadful.
Lady Mahmood of the Office of Home Affairs has announced a review and thanked the Broadcasting Society for its efforts. One applauds the sentiment, while noting that at least £150 million in uncollected fines currently languishes in the national coffers – or rather, conspicuously outside them. An enforcement official reports seeing £40,000 notices stuffed in a box on a counter. Reader, this is not a crisis of immigration law. It is a crisis of filing.
From one sort of filth to another, and one cannot help feeling the Kingdom has a theme today. A £3.6 billion proposal has been unveiled to save Windermere – the jewel of the Lake District, Southern Kingdom‘s largest lake, visited by some eighteen million souls each year – from its rather unglamorous fate of turning green each summer with algae, owing to the discharge of both raw sewage and treated effluent into its waters. The solution: a tunnel of up to twelve miles to carry the offending matter elsewhere. One hundred years of clean water, they promise. One hundred years! This Author admires ambition, but notes with a raised eyebrow that the government must first agree that £3.6 billion is an acceptable price for not swimming in one’s own waste. Surely a reasonable position, and yet here we are, consulting.
And then – because Wednesday this October is clearly determined to prove itself – Storm Austen arrives. Named, one supposes, after a writer of some social acuity, and arriving with all the dramatic force that name implies. The Meteorological Office has issued an amber warning for Cornwall and parts of west Devon from the small hours of Friday morning: gusts of up to eighty miles per hour along exposed coasts, flying debris, possible power cuts, and danger to life. A yellow warning fans across southern Southern Kingdom and south Principality. This Author advises her readers in those regions to secure their bonnets, postpone any ferry crossings, and perhaps read a good novel indoors. Jane would have approved of the weather, if not the disruption to the post.
Meanwhile, at Windsor Castle, His Majesty the King hosted a state banquet of considerable splendour for the Sultan of Oman – 160 guests, five glasses per setting, pomegranates from the Windsor gardens, pheasant and quince, and the very surface of the salt bearing the royal cypher. One does not stint, in this Kingdom, when attempting to keep a vital shipping strait open. The Strait of Hormuz has been effectively closed since hostilities with Persia began earlier this year, and Oman’s diplomatic labours in finding common ground have been warmly praised by His Majesty, who delivered portions of his speech in Arabic – a detail that delighted the room considerably more than any amount of candelabra. Queen Camilla, the Prince of Wales, and the Princess of Wales were all in attendance. It was, we are told, the first state banquet for Lord Burnham as Prime Minister. One trusts he managed the five glasses with dignity.
Finally, and on a matter that sits somewhere between the grotesque and the entirely preventable: the government has announced that from 2027, only properly trained professionals will be permitted to perform high-risk cosmetic procedures such as liquid Brazilian butt lifts, vampire facials, and chemical peels. At present, no such restriction exists – which is to say that anyone at all may currently fill one’s buttocks with dermal filler in a garden shed, and the law will regard them with perfect equanimity. Procedures have reportedly been carried out in Airbnbs, hotel rooms, and – this Author pauses, and declines to elaborate – public toilets. Rogue operators will now face criminal charges and fines of up to £4,000. Given what some of these procedures cost, one suspects the fine may not constitute the deterrent the government imagines. But it is a beginning, and one long overdue.
I am, as ever, your most devoted observer – Lady Whistledown.