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The Spectator's Notes

Charles Moore

Wednesday, 30th January 2008

Charles Moore's reflections on the week

In the fuss about MPs employing family members, one important reason why they often give jobs to their wives is ignored. Their wives often start off as their secretaries and only marry them later. Sometimes, the marriage involves getting rid of the MP’s first wife. If the wife is the secretary, the MP cannot have an affair with his secretary. If the secretary leaves the job on marrying the MP, she obviously, as Jimmy Goldsmith famously said about the man who married his mistress, ‘creates a vacancy’.

It is surprising that more attention has not been given to the case of Robert Fidler. Mr Fidler wanted to build a house on his farm in Surrey. Fed up with delays from the local planners, he noted that if a building has been ‘substantially completed’ for four years without any planning objection, the authorities cannot order its demolition. He therefore constructed what the newspapers call a ‘castle’ behind hundreds of bales of straw covered with a blue tarpaulin, and lived in it secretly for the time required. He had been worried about the ‘boring view’ while he and his family lived for years behind the bales, but found that many robins made their nests in them and a duck hatched 13 ducklings there, which cheered them up. Now the castle (really a middle-sized castellated house) is revealed, and it looks sturdy and handsome. Reigate and Banstead Borough Council wants it knocked down, and the matter has gone to the Secretary of State. I watched the local BBC News interview Mr Fidler in his large and impressive kitchen. The slant was that Mr Fidler was the one who should explain himself. But surely it is the council which should be scrutinised. It is typical of planning attitudes that nothing was done to prevent Mr Fidler’s enormous and ugly blue tarpaulin with tyres hanging off it as it defiled the landscape for years. Only when he unveiled his house was there an outcry about desecration of the Green Belt. What an absurd country where we can only build attractive buildings under camouflage. It will be a scandal if the demolition of Castle Fidler is now ordered. It is a monument to human ingenuity.