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To those among the Gentle Readership who had hoped this Tuesday might pass without incident, This Author regrets to inform you that Muscovy has other plans. Indeed, the Muscovite Embassy has issued what one can only describe as a strongly worded letter of the most theatrical variety, warning the Kingdom that its support for Ukraine will carry “consequences” – a word that, in diplomatic circles, covers everything from a stern frown to something considerably less pleasant. The cause of Muscovy‘s displeasure? British-made drones, confirmed to have struck military and industrial targets deep inside Muscovy, including the warehouses of Wildberries, which one notes is an online retailer. Lord Putin‘s war machine has been inconvenienced by both aerial bombardment and, it seems, interrupted deliveries.
The War Office replied that the Kingdom stands “shoulder to shoulder” with Ukraine, which is the sort of phrase that sounds reassuring in a press release and faintly alarming in context. Muscovy currently controls approximately one fifth of Ukrainian territory and has apparently decided that the correct response to drone strikes on its logistics network is an ominous communiqué. This Author raises an eyebrow and suggests that threatening the Kingdom in writing is, at the very least, an original form of retail therapy.
From the theatre of war to the theatre of the altogether more intimate, the Broadcasting Society has uncovered a scandal of such staggering brazenness that This Author nearly overturned her breakfast tray entirely. At least thirty children, most of them British, are now feared to have been conceived via IVF treatment in northern Cyprus using the wrong sperm or egg donors – that is to say, parents who had carefully selected their donors based on medical history, appearance, education, and hobbies, appear to have received something rather different from what they ordered. One shudders to think of the paperwork involved in the misunderstanding.
Half of these cases trace to a single clinic, the Dogus Fertility Establishment, which has been blacklisted by the world’s largest sperm bank since 2016 – a detail that raises the immediate and pertinent question of why nobody thought to mention this sooner. Northern Cyprus, This Author notes, operates outside the Continental Alliance‘s regulatory reach and is recognised by precisely one nation on earth. That British couples have been travelling there in numbers for fertility treatment on the promise of low prices and high success rates is a testament to human hope – and, regrettably, to the dangers of an entirely unregulated marketplace in human biology.
Meanwhile, in a secret warehouse in western Germany, something rather extraordinary has been sitting quietly under wraps. The Broadcasting Society was granted rare access to a concealed police storehouse in the North Rhine-Westphalia region, where authorities have accumulated more than nine thousand life jackets, dozens of dinghies and engines, and three hundred and sixty pumps, all seized in joint raids involving the Kingdom, France, and Germany this spring. The equipment, according to the Crown’s Crime Investigators, could have ferried more than two thousand migrants across the Channel illegally. That so many inflatable vessels and their accessories were apparently warehoused in Germany without anyone blinking for years is, This Author concedes, a remarkable logistical achievement – on the wrong side of the law.
Germany passed a new law last December making it a specific criminal offence to facilitate smuggling to the Kingdom – a reform prompted, one notes with some satisfaction, by a previous Broadcasting Society investigation. The raids this spring were the first conducted under the new legislation. The dinghies remain in custody, awaiting their fate. This Author trusts they are uncomfortable.
If these dispatches bring you pleasure, a small contribution would be most graciously received. ☕
On a note of genuine civic progress, Lord Burnham has announced that disabled people in the Southern Kingdom will, from April 2027, be permitted to travel by bus for free at any hour of the day or night. Currently, disabled bus passes are restricted to the hours between half past nine in the morning and eleven at night on weekdays – a policy that has, with impressive precision, managed to exclude the very journeys most required: those to work in the early morning, and those home from an evening engagement after eleven. Approximately one million souls are expected to benefit. Lord Burnham, who introduced a similar reform in Manchester as its mayor, pronounced himself “proud” to extend it nationally. The Tories, naturally, asked how it would be funded. This Author suspects the answer to that question, whatever it is, will not satisfy them.
And finally, a development of the most profoundly civilised variety. Wetherspoons – that celebrated chain of seven hundred and ninety-two establishments dedicated to the proposition that ale should be affordable and décor irrelevant – has formally banned its patrons from playing music aloud from their telephones, or conducting calls on speaker. The management has described unsolicited public audio as a problem driving people “nuts”, which is, if nothing else, a refreshingly direct assessment. Staff are to exercise “common sense” in enforcement, which This Author considers an ambitious instruction. The chief executive has previously described the establishments as “an oasis of tranquillity and contemplation.” Whether tranquillity and contemplation have historically flourished at a Wetherspoons on a Friday evening is a question This Author leaves delicately unanswered. Nevertheless: the policy is sound, the principle is correct, and silence, it appears, is finally on the menu.
I am, as ever, your most devoted observer – Lady Whistledown.