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Dearest Gentle Reader,
Nearly half. That is the proportion of schoolmasters and schoolmistresses across the Southern Kingdom who confide, in the plainest possible terms, that they intend to abandon their posts within five years. One in ten plan to be gone within the year. This Author invites you to sit with that figure for a moment, perhaps whilst your own children’s governess is marking thirty exercise books at midnight, weeping gently into a cold cup of tea.
The Liberal Democrat Society has taken this intelligence to the new Education Secretary – a post currently occupied by one Lucy Powell, whose name does not yet appear on our established register of nobility but whose in-tray appears already to be on fire – and demanded emergency measures. Limits on overtime. Full funding of pay rises. The Department for Learning, for its part, noted that last year saw the lowest rate of departures since 2010, which is rather like a doctor informing a patient that their fever, whilst considerable, has not quite reached the point of combustion. There remains, the Department conceded, “more to do.” Quite.
From the classroom to the gaol cell, for Lord Burnham has had what one might charitably call a complicated morning on the matter of prisoner release. Having already narrowed his early release scheme to exclude those convicted of manslaughter – a concession wrested from him by the tenacious campaign of Lady Harper, widow of PC Harper, who was killed in 2019 – Lord Burnham now finds himself accused of simply shuffling the dangerous from one column to another. There are, the Tories point out, some 856 prisoners currently held under indefinite sentences whom the independent Parole Board has deemed unsafe to release. Lord Burnham proposes to begin untangling this particular knot to relieve the overcrowding. The shadow justice spokesman, one Nick Timothy, has observed with forensic bluntness that those still detained under such sentences are, by definition, there because experts concluded they were dangerous. This Author shall not adjudicate. She will merely note that the nation’s gaols resemble a gentleman’s wardrobe in which one can never quite close the door without something else falling out.
On a matter of far graver weight: the rabbi of the Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation in Manchester has spoken ahead of this day’s memorial service for two members of his community, Melvin Cravitz and Adrian Daulby, killed on Yom Kippur last year when a man attacked their synagogue. Rabbi Daniel Walker’s words carry no comfort in them. He says the congregation feels less safe now than it did immediately after the attack. The sense of vulnerability has grown, not diminished. Violent hate crimes targeting Jewish people have risen by nearly two thirds since 2022, across 33 constabularies in the Southern Kingdom and the Principality. In the months since Manchester, attacks occurred in Sydney, in Golders Green, in the streets of the Capital. This Author does not deal in despair, but she will set down her pen for a moment and acknowledge that some dispatches require no wit at all.
If these dispatches bring you pleasure, a small contribution would be most graciously received. ☕
To matters rather more diverting: the Tories are reshuffling, which is to say they are rearranging the furniture in a house whose windows are, at present, somewhat draughty. Lady Badenoch will next month usher in one Tom Tugendhat – newly assigned for this column’s purposes the title of Viscount Tugendhat – to replace Dame Priti Patel as shadow foreign secretary. Dame Priti departs to “strengthen links with sister parties and centre-right movements around the world,” which sounds enormously glamorous and This Author suspects involves rather more air miles than one’s liver can comfortably sustain. Sir James Cleverly has already vacated the shadow housing brief to pursue the mayoralty of the Capital. Viscount Tugendhat, who finished fourth in the 2024 leadership contest and has spent the intervening period on the backbenches presumably perfecting his international gravitas, returns to the front line. The game, as they say, is afoot.
Finally, a word for the parents of gravely ill children, and for the Children’s Commissioner, one Dame Rachel de Souza, who has called upon the government to grant those parents twelve weeks of paid leave at ninety percent of their normal wages. The campaign was sparked by the parents of little Hugh Menai-Davis, who died of cancer aged six in 2021, and whose family have since argued, with complete and unanswerable logic, that no employer’s rota should stand between a parent and a dying child’s bedside. Dame Rachel also calls for unpaid carer’s leave to be doubled from five to ten days. The government is consulting. This Author trusts they will consult with some urgency, for the matter admits of no particularly amusing irony whatsoever – and that, in this column, is the highest possible mark of seriousness.
I am, as ever, your most devoted observer – Lady Whistledown.