I learn from my epolitix bulletin that:
Shadow housing minister Grant Shapps, industry expert Owen Inskip and TV presenter Kirstie Allsopp launch a Conservative Party review of home-buying. The aim is to investigate whether there is “a better, faster and less stressful way to buy and sell homes in England and Wales”.
Kirsty has been for several years one of my minor-league heroines. She sends out all manner of comforting role-model type messages – it’s okay to be bleatingly posh and have a strange sense of humour, and sometimes eat too many pies, and be really good at your job, and still wear great shoes. She wore great shoes even when picking her way down muddy farm tracks in Wales.
I don’t really know why I am surprised – that’s practically an identikit Tory girl I’ve just described. For all her quirks, it’s part of Kirsty’s calling to be unforgivingly upper-mainstream in her economic outlook. When you’re surrounded by the affluent minority, of course they look normal. The only first time buyers she ever meets have their deposit provided and a quarter of their mortgage guaranteed by mummy and daddy.
No, maybe she is not much of a loss to my liberal heart. I will sometimes develop these trashy tastes, in spite of my best efforts. Like my Nigella phase – what was I thinking? Let this be a lesson to me; I need to attach my affections to a new property programme guru, someone more eco-friendly, conceptual, aesthetic, less of a generalist, more of a specialist, someone more inclined to wear black and like European cinema…
We need to get Kevin McCloud onto a working group right away.
December 7, 2007 at 12:29 pm
I was actually surprised at how much they made of this today. It was announced I’m sure maybe a year ago that she would he helping develop Tory housing policy. Kevin would be good, though I thought I read he was already working on a review for someone – he’s certainly just not long ago announced he’s working on a community development project round where he lives (Wiltshire/Somerset – somewhere that way) as my Oxfordshire Community Land Trusts were going to try to get him as a patron until we read about that. Just to piss off Kirsty though, maybe we should try to get Phil Spencer on board!
December 7, 2007 at 12:40 pm
You’ll have to defect to the Cult of Sarah Beeny instead!
December 7, 2007 at 1:40 pm
Nah, Sarah Beeny strikes me as distinctly Nu-Labour. Also for ages she regularly used the phrase “gross profit” when she meant “net profit” and I don’t forgive easy.
Phil comes across as a hopeless Tory, albeit one with a sense of humour. Maybe that makes them easier to turn… Seriously though, wouldn’t Kevin be fantastic to talk to about sustainable housing, and about the self-contained energy stuff the Tories have just nicked.