Friday, June 22, 2007

Not Me, Guv

Today I received a letter from Mr Clarke of Nottingham. It read...
Mr Dale, Re your housing article in the Sunday Telegraph. What about the
English countryside? You can't allow free market completely, surely? I
sometimes think we will concrete over as much as Prescott.

Now, firstly, I have never written an article for the Sunday Telegraph, and secondly, I have never written an article on housing for anyone. I can only think he is confusing me with someone else. But who? Over to you, dear reader.

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

Dale Winton? Arthur Daley? One of The Chippendales?

Or given the content of the email, probably confusing you with EmmerDale.

Anonymous said...

It will be leaked to the Guardian tomorrow as a job offer from Gordon Brown!

Anonymous said...

Well putitng two and two together you DO write for the Telegraph and you did write an article on Iain Dale's Diary blog of 14 June 2007 called:

Sir Ming's Madcap Scheme

http://iaindale.blogspot.com/2007/06/sir-mings-madcap-scheme.html

The article was certainly about housing and the Lib Dem plans to solve the shortage of housing by authorising councils to buy up farmland and award themselves planning permission.

Perhaps switching between blogging, TV and dead tree press all in the space of a few hours is confusing your fan base?

Machiavelli's Understudy said...

These people have no sense of proportion... Is it something like just 7-10% of our landspace is made up of the built environment? So what if the free market (ie, people making choices for themselves) means building in the countryside (I make a presumption about the article and the letter writer here)?

60 million people live in the UK. Is the remaining 90% of land suddenly going to fill up with new buildings for a mahoosive explosion in the population?

Considering the Town and Country Planning Act and Prescott's batshit-mad local planning frameworks are the reason I i) can't afford to buy my first home and ii) am not allowed to build my own affordable home because a developer has filled the local plan's quota, I'm surprisingly supportive of any proposal to allow homes to be built where there's land so that people can get a foot on the property ladder.

Anonymous said...

Mr Clarke of Nottingham

Dear Ken,

Not me

Yours,

Iain

Anonymous said...

Iain, unless the "letter" had no return address why are you subjected this to public knowledge? Couldnt you just email/write back and query the person directly? Would be a far more gentlemanly thing to do.

Chris Paul said...

Unless of course it's Mr Ken Clarke of Notts and he's smoking herbal cigars these days.

Iain Dale said...

Sometimes I am so glad I write this blog.

Peter, all I was doing was to see if anyone recalled an article in the Sun Tel so I could write back to tell him who he was confusing me with. I thought it might be Michael Gove but I can;t find an article by him in the Sun Tel.