Margaret Colley wraps up seven days dominated by royal wealth, elite schooling, Tudor history and international diplomacy
Final column of the week, and finally, mercifully, a chance to close out four stories that have between them occupied nearly every piece I’ve filed since Monday morning, which is either a genuinely remarkable news week or proof that readers will follow almost anything with enough sustained commitment on the part of the writer.
Closing the royal money thread properly this time, once and for all. The piece on the couple’s wealth building plan has been, by every metric I track, the standout performer of the week, and I say that as someone who’s watched a great many stories rise and fall across a genuinely long career in this business.
Wrapping the Eton coverage too, at least for now, though I suspect it’ll resurface eventually the way these things always do around here. The story on Eton’s leader-making record generated more reader letters than any single story I’ve written this quarter, a genuine achievement for a piece about a school’s own self-assessment.
Final word on the historical detour, which proved genuinely more useful than I expected when I first mentioned it in passing earlier this week. The Henry VIII own coverage proved, across the whole week, that a five-hundred-year-old subject can still hold an audience when the material’s genuinely well presented.
And closing the international thread as well, appropriately, given how much of the week it occupied. The piece on Trump’s comments to Burnham caps a week I genuinely didn’t see coming when I sat down at my desk seven days ago with nothing planned beyond the usual grumbling about Westminster.
Sat with the whole week laid out in front of me this evening, four stories, dozens of column inches, and genuinely more reader engagement than I’ve seen in months of ordinary political reporting, thinking, not for the first time, that the job’s rarely about predicting what people will care about.
Onwards to whatever next week brings, though after this one, I’m not making any predictions whatsoever.
Packed up my desk for the weekend a little later than usual, genuinely satisfied with how the week had unfolded despite starting with no plan whatsoever for four separate stories to dominate every single edition. My editor stopped by on his way out, admitting this had genuinely been one of the more enjoyable weeks he’d overseen in years, purely because the material kept surprising all of us right up until Friday afternoon.
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