Get well, Adele

In his last months as prime minister, Gordon Brown sat down and wrote a fan letter to a young British singer-songwriter. ‘With the troubles that the country’s in financially,’ he told her, ‘you are a light at the end of the tunnel.’ Last weekend that light officially went out: Adele has suffered a career-threatening vocal cord injury and will not sing again this year. OK, so it’s impossible to prove cause and effect, but you have to wonder if the curse of Gordon Brown has struck again.

To understand what bad news this is, remember that it’s barely three months since the death of Amy Winehouse. Now Britain may be about to lose a second surreally gifted musician with big hair and pipe-cleaner-length eyelashes. At 23, Adele has already beaten Madonna’s record for the longest stint by a woman at the top of the British album chart. She is the first artist since the Beatles to have had two top five singles and two top five albums at the same time.