At fourteen minutes past ten on Wednesday morning, a hot microphone in Richard Branson’s Necker Island study caught the proprietor of Virgin saying that a four-month-old foetus was ‘a bit of a freeloader, frankly’ and that it should ‘make its own way’. Cat Deeley, visibly thrilled, asked him to repeat it, and he did, twice, once for the satellite delay. Ofcom logged 4,200 complaints before the first ad break. Of those, 3,800 mentioned the £8,500 price of his new balloon experience, 400 mentioned the foetus, and one, from a Mr Hedley of Nuneaton, complained that the balloon was not even going anywhere.
A spokesperson for Virgin Group said the remarks were ‘a light-hearted aside about the miracle of life’ and that Sir Richard had ‘personally apologised to the womb’.
The foetus has been named Peregrine and is already a brand ambassador
By Tuesday afternoon the parents, Dominic and Sarah Lubbock of Chiswick, had appeared on Good Morning Britain, where they announced that the foetus would be called Peregrine and that it had an Instagram account, @peregrineinthewomb, which acquired ninety thousand followers in the time it takes your correspondent to find her reading glasses. Sir Richard sent a hamper from Virgin Wines, a lifetime Virgin Atlantic miles card and a non-executive directorship of Virgin StartUp, effective from birth.
“We are delighted for the little one, and we take the directorship very seriously,” said Dominic Lubbock, 38, a quantity surveyor who has not yet met his son.
Peregrine has also been approached by Pampers, which is understood to be offering a three-year arrangement with a break clause at weaning. A midwife at West Middlesex Hospital described the twenty-week scan as ‘completely normal’, a remark the Lubbocks have chosen to take as a snub, and one which your correspondent, who has had three completely normal scans and no hamper whatsoever, can only applaud.
Branson apologises with a charity single that nobody asked for
On Monday, Sir Richard released ‘Little Passenger’, a charity single recorded with the London Community Gospel Choir, the proceeds of which would go to the Royal College of Midwives. It entered the iTunes chart at 143, below a remastered ‘Mr Blobby’ and above a podcast about fracking. In the accompanying video, Sir Richard, in a babygrow emblazoned with the word ‘Peregrine’, floats above the Thames in a Virgin hot-air balloon while miming the couplet ‘you have not yet a name, but you have a loyalty card’.
“We are grateful but busy,” said a spokeswoman for the Royal College of Midwives, who asked not to be named and, on the evidence of her tone, asked not to be contacted again.
Sir Richard then pledged to match every pound raised, up to £50,000, a sum he described as ‘a rounding error’. Your correspondent has checked, and it is.
Virgin announces a gestational carbon offsetting fee for unborn children
On Wednesday’s edition, Sir Richard appeared in the studio in person to apologise, though he spent the greater part of the interview promoting Virgin Atlantic’s new Expectant Traveller policy. From 1 January, unborn children will be charged ten per cent of a standard fare, a levy he calls ‘gestational carbon offsetting’.
“Nothing about life is fair, Cat, and the sooner Peregrine learns that, the better,” said Sir Richard Branson, founder of the Virgin Group and, as of this week, the only man in Britain with a position on the unborn.
The money, he explained, would plant one tree per trimester in the Virgin rainforest in Sussex. There is no Virgin rainforest in Sussex. There is a caravan park near Bognor and, on a good day, a buzzard. The audience applauded, then stopped, then applauded again when a producer held up a card reading APPLAUD.
The ultrasound, the balloon and the £8,500 question
The programme ended with a live ultrasound from Chiswick, in which Peregrine was observed to yawn. Your correspondent has seen many things on television, including a man being buried in baked beans on the Isle of Wight in 1994, and she has never seen anything less like a yawn. It was gas. It is always gas.
Sir Richard then released five hundred Virgin balloons over the Isle of Dogs, each containing a voucher for £50 off a balloon flight, non-transferable, expiring at midnight. The Lubbocks have since signed with a talent agency in Soho and are in talks with Netflix about a documentary entitled ‘Womb with a View’, which will be six episodes long and will not mention the gas. Ofcom has confirmed that it will not investigate, as the complaints were, in its words, ‘mostly about the price’, a formulation your correspondent intends to have engraved upon her own headstone.
It was at this point that your correspondent, who had been following proceedings with a small sherry and a mounting sense of dread, was obliged to admit that she had been talking about the wrong thing entirely. One had assumed the story concerned the hot-air balloon, a conveyance she has loathed since 1987, when one landed on her aunt’s conservatory in Leamington Spa and a man in a cravat asked for a cup of tea. One then assumed it concerned inheritance, and the passing of things from one who has everything to one who has nothing, a subject upon which your correspondent has strong and largely unpublished views. It does not. It concerns a foetus, and your correspondent finds, on reflection, that she rather likes it. It has said nothing. It has asked for nothing. It has, so far as one can establish, no opinion on the price of a balloon flight. If it is a freeloader, it is the only honest one in the story, and when it is born it will be charged ten per cent of a fare to leave the country of its birth, which is more than Sir Richard has ever been charged to leave anybody’s.
The five hundred balloons, being biodegradable, are already rotting in the Thames, which is where the vouchers are, and where, in time, we shall all be, though not before the weather turns.
