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Dearest Gentle Reader,
There are days when the news arrives not as a collection of separate stories, but as a single, sustained indictment of the age. This Wednesday is one such day. This Author shall not pretend otherwise, nor reach for a jest where none is merited. She shall, however, observe what must be observed – and raise, where appropriate, one very pointed eyebrow.
The Broadcasting Society this week brings us four women of considerable courage, who have waived their anonymity to speak of horrors visited upon them as children. Their testimonies, spanning 2002 to last year, form the documentary Britain’s Forgotten Girls, and the title alone ought to shame every institution it implies. Each was targeted as a girl, manipulated into abusive relationships by boys and older men connected to drug gangs, then repeatedly subjected to the most grievous exploitation. Each subsequently found the authorities – those very personages sworn to protect the public – unwilling to take their allegations seriously. One, who was thirteen when first contacted online by a man a full decade her senior, describes violence so severe she feared for her life. That any child should arrive at such a fear and then find the constabulary unmoved is, to this Author, a condemnation requiring no embellishment whatsoever.
From one failure of duty to another, albeit of a very different register. Today, Hartlepool pauses to bid farewell to PC Blades, aged thirty-seven, father of two, and formerly – this detail caught this Author quite off guard – a schoolteacher of English. His colleague PC Clough, thirty-eight, fell beside him on the A66 on the 22nd of August, when a Volkswagen Passat driven the wrong way into their path ended seven lives at once. Five young men also perished. Miss Somerville of the Cleveland Constabulary Federation spoke for his family with quiet dignity, noting that “life feels unbearably quiet” without his silly jokes. Road closures in Hartlepool this morning are, one suspects, the least the town can offer. The sympathy of strangers from Australia, France, and the American Colonies has apparently been considerable. It does not bring him back, but it speaks well of those who sent it.
Now, this Author is compelled to address a matter of such bureaucratic wretchedness that even the gravest of days must accommodate a raised eyebrow. The average learner driver in this Kingdom must wait twenty weeks merely to book a driving test – and then a further eleven weeks to actually sit it. Nearly eight months, Gentle Reader, between aspiration and examination. Lady Alexander, the Transport Secretary, had initially promised the DVSA would meet a seven-week target by the end of last year. That target was pushed to summer 2026. Summer 2026 has come and gone with the target unmet, and Lady Alexander has since admitted as much. One young woman, aged nineteen, reports rising at a quarter to six each morning to join a digital queue that placed her twenty-one thousand positions from the front. Twenty-one thousand. This Author has waited for fewer things with fewer complaints, and she once queued for a milliner in a February gale.
If these dispatches bring you pleasure, a small contribution would be most graciously received. ☕
And then there is the case of Annabelle Boucher of Somerset, who endured years of coercive and controlling behaviour at the hands of her husband, saw him plead guilty in a court of law, and was nevertheless ordered by the family courts to pay him £75,000 upon divorce – plus her own legal costs, bringing the full bill to over £105,000. The War Office for Justice has now begun a consultation to reform the law so that family courts may, in future, account for the criminal conduct of abusive spouses. One is gratified that a consultation has been launched, whilst noting with some asperity that it required a woman to pay a criminal for the privilege of escaping him before anyone thought to enquire whether the law was, in fact, just. Progress, this Author supposes, arrives on its own schedule – much like a driving test.
This Author turns, with some relief, to the National Television Awards, where Mr Alan Carr was surprised on Tuesday evening with the Special Recognition prize, and promptly fulfilled his own prophecy of ugly crying. He had arrived predicting he would lose to Mrs Brown’s Boys, which duly won Comedy with the predictability of a parliamentary scandal. And yet the evening belonged to Carr, whose turn on Celebrity Traitors brought him a popularity he himself described as unlike anything prior. Co-star Charlotte Church declared the final – fifteen million viewers within seven days – a “beautiful vignette of male tenderness.” Sir David Attenborough, meanwhile, was named Best Presenter in his hundredth birthday year. Hundredth. This Author declines to compete with that. She merely tips her lorgnette in his direction and concedes the field entirely.
I am, as ever, your most devoted observer – Lady Whistledown.