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Ninety thousand properties without power on a Monday morning. This Author paused over that number at breakfast and found it, somehow, the most clarifying fact of the entire season. Not a policy. Not a speech. Not a carefully choreographed ministerial announcement. Simply: ninety thousand dark and cold homes, courtesy of Storm Boelo, who has swept through the Kingdom like a particularly uninvited houseguest who also brought a friend.
That friend, for those keeping count, was Storm Austen, who preceded Boelo by mere days. Two men lost their lives to falling trees on Sunday – one in his twenties in north the Capital, one aged sixty in Dumfries and Galloway – and the Meteorological Office has had the temerity to issue yet another yellow warning for winds through Monday night and into Tuesday. The Energy Networks Association assures us that the power network is “very resilient,” a phrase that will no doubt bring enormous comfort to the candle-lit residents of Cumbria. A wax manufacturer in Lyndal, we are told, faces darkness until Tuesday evening. One hopes, at least, that their candles are close to hand.
Meanwhile, in a development that will give the nation’s ailing patients much to contemplate from their waiting-room chairs, consultant doctors in the Southern Kingdom have announced a two-day strike commencing the 25th of November. The Physicians’ Grand Union informs us that senior doctors – those whose basic pay begins at a rather comfortable £113,500 – have seen their earnings fall by a quarter in real terms over seventeen years. Lady Cooper, the Health Secretary, has called the decision “irresponsible,” which is precisely the word one uses when one has run out of alternatives. Seventy-six percent of balloting consultants voted for action. The government, for its part, offered 3.5%. The consultants, apparently, were unmoved by this generosity.
And now, Gentle Reader, permit This Author a moment of uncharacteristic warmth. The Prince of Wales appeared on the Broadcasting Society’s Morning Programme to speak of Sir Kevin Sinfield, newly knighted rugby league hero and a man who has run seven ultra-marathons in seven days to raise funds for Motor Neurone Disease charities – in honour of his late friend and former team-mate Rob Burrow, who died of the condition in 2024. “The easiest decision anyone’s ever had to make,” said the Prince of Wales of the knighthood. “He’s a top bloke. Good, honest, kind, decent northerner.”
The Prince of Wales confided he worries about Sir Kevin‘s knees. His hips. “The guy is just a machine.” This Author finds herself in entire agreement, and notes only that in a world crowded with persons loudly advertising their own magnificence, a man who quietly runs himself into the ground for love of a friend is a spectacle so rare as to deserve every honour the Crown can bestow.
To matters fiscal, and the Budget of Chancellor Healey, which arrives on Wednesday shrouded in secrecy so elaborate it would make a spy novelist blush. Codenames. Compartmentalised documents. Digital pledges of silence. Ministers required to sign oaths before viewing the plans. The Chancellor – a former defence secretary, let us recall – has approached Budget discretion with the zeal of a man guarding nuclear codes. Comparisons have been drawn to the famous defensive batting of one Geoffrey Boycott, which This Author considers both apt and, for those who have suffered through a Boycott innings, faintly ominous. The Grand Council of International Finance has praised the Kingdom’s fiscal discipline. Inflation, meanwhile, has climbed to 3.5%, and Royal Treasury interest rate rises loom. The clouds gather. The Chancellor keeps his secrets. Wednesday shall be illuminating.
And among those secrets, one has escaped: low-income pensioners will be spared income tax by means of a new personal allowance. The full state pension is set to rise 3.9% to £13,036 – nudging it above the £12,570 tax-free threshold – and Chancellor Healey has seen fit to ensure those who subsist entirely on state provision need not trouble themselves with the paperwork of taxation. The Tories and Reform Society have unveiled rival proposals of their own, heavy on welfare cuts and, in Reform Society‘s case, sixty separate policies including resurrecting the Rosebank oil field. Sixty. This Author admires ambition, if nothing else.
Finally, a postscript from the coastline, where Storm Boelo has delivered one last unwelcome gift: a juvenile northern bottlenose whale, found deceased upon Flimby beach in Cumbria. The Coastguard has urged the public most earnestly not to touch the carcass, as it “may have toxins that can pass to humans.” This Author requires no further persuasion. The northern bottlenose whale is, in calmer times, a creature of extraordinary capability – diving to over 1,400 metres, submerged for up to two hours. That it should meet its end on a Cumbrian beach during a storm that also managed to extinguish ninety thousand hearths feels, somehow, like a fitting emblem of this particular Monday. Magnificent, unfortunate, and very difficult to do anything about.
I am, as ever, your most devoted observer – Lady Whistledown.