How to defend the indefensible

 

On Monday 19 June the House of Commons will spend the whole day debating the report of the Privileges Committee that has concluded, after a long investigation, that Boris Johnson lied repeatedly and intentionally to the House of Commons (and to the committee) about parties held in 10 Downing Street during lockdowns when parties were against the very laws that Johnson announced to the public.

 

Now, it is a fundamental principle of our Constitution that the House of Commons hold the government to account, and that in order to do so ministers must never lie to the House. Indeed, MPs are forbidden by Parliamentary precedent to accuse a member of the House of lying because the Constitution assumes that all are, in the words of a contemporary historian, “good chaps”.

 

Johnson and his coterie have sought to dismiss and undermine the report, not by engaging with its evidence and the facts, but by denigrating the members of the committee; that the committee is unlawful and a “kangaroo court”; claiming that the enquiry was a ploy by Johnson’s enemies to remove him from politics; still worse a plot of Remainers (or Remoaners as they like to call them) regularly conjured up by Brexiters; unconstitutional and un-democratic; spiteful; and so on.

 

Let’s start with the denigration. The chair of the committee, the Labour MP Harriet Harman (the chair is by constitutional precedent a member of the largest opposition party), had once tweeted that if Johnson and the then Chancellor of the Exchequer (now Prime Minister and loathed by Johnson’s followers) Rishi Sunak had admitted attending an illegal party in 10 Downing Street then they had misled the House of Commons. Johnsonites allege that this proves that Harman had already convicted him of the offence which has been the subject of the enquiry. This is not correct. Johnson was investigated not for misleading (since he had himself that he had misled, claiming to have done so unintentionally) but of doing so recklessly or intentionally. To hold a view that is self-evidently true can hardly be said to constitute bias.

 

The next problem is that four of the seven members of the committee are, like Johnson, members of the governing Conservative Party. How then to demonstrate that even Johnson’s own colleagues were not qualified to judge him? The answer was to accuse a Conservative committee member of attending an illegal party and then to argue that he was guilty of the same offence as Johnson. The fall guy was one Sir Bernard Jenkin, like Johnson a Brexiter (not therefore a scheming Remoaner), who, no sooner was the report published, than he was accused of illegally attending a birthday party for his wife. Now, in the first place Johnson has not been found guilty of attending illegal parties (an established fact) but of intentionally lying about parties. It seems that the “party” was a perfectly legal meeting, organized by the Deputy Speaker of the House after lockdown for political business (permitted by law) and in a suitably spaced environment, attended by Jenkin’s wife. Jenkin, apparently, collected her from the meeting (whether or not while doing so he was offered a drink is not known).

 

Not only have Johnson’s supporters resorted to denigration, they have also sought to take a spurious moral high ground as defenders of free speech. Formally speaking, criticism of the committee is a contempt of the House since the House appointed the committee to carry out its duties as representatives of the House. Now, MPs can be sanctioned for a contempt. This has been portrayed as suppression of free speech. I suppose that it is possible to exercise one’s right to free speech by spuriously denigrating a fellow MP, but there is a fine line between that and intimidation. The committee members have received threats since their integrity has been questioned. Moreover, some of Johnson’s supporters have gone further still and have suggested that any Conservative MP who votes in favour of the report might be deselected as candidate by their constituency party at the next election.

 

Concerning a plot concerted by Johnson’s enemies, the committee’s enquiry was voted for unanimously by MPs, including Boris Johnson himself and his parliamentary apologists. It is highly improbable that Johnson and his advisers were so naïve as to approve a committee of his enemies, or were somehow duped. Moreover, for the report to take effect a majority of the House has to vote to approve it. That would make the cohort of enemies improbably large.

 

The accusation that the committee and its process are unconstitutional and undemocratic rests on the argument that in the 2019 general election Johnson won “a huge personal mandate” by securing a majority of 80 seats in the House of Commons. Now, one of Johnson’s arch apologists, William Rees Mogg, is particularly fond of citing our Constitution and constitutional precedents, but in this case he and Johnson’s other apologists completely distort the meaning of the Constitution and of our electoral system. We do not directly elect an individual as Prime Minister. Instead, we simply elect an MP to represent us in our constituency. The King then invites an individual MP to be his Prime Minister and to form a government. By tradition and precedent this is the person who is the leader of the party that secures a majority or the largest number of the seats in the House. He (or she) does not hold office by dint of a personal mandate but only by the invitation of the King.

 

The situation in 2019 was clear: the Conservatives won a majority of seats, Johnson was leader of the Conservative Party, and so the King invited him to be Primer Minister. Any personal mandate was irrelevant. Thus, for example, Jim Callaghan was a minority Labour Prime Minister from 1976-1979 and there are several examples in the more distant past of minority government. Alternatively, the monarch can invite an MP to form a coalition government. In 2010 no party won a majority, although the Conservatives won more seats than any other party. The Queen could have invited either the Conservative David Cameron or the Labour leader Gordon Brown to form a majority by negotiating a coalition with the Liberal Democratic Party.

 

In short, it is a constitutional impossibility to claim a personal mandate for Johnson. Indeed, it would be a constitutional outrage were the House to find that a Prime minister had lied to the House and the liar were not sanctioned.

 

Concerning the accusation that the judgement of the committee is spiteful, that is in part a matter of opinion, but also a ploy to diminish the severity of Johnson’s offences. As part of the committee’ process, Johnson was sent in confidence the committee’s report before it was published so that he could correct any errors and refute any charges with which he disagreed. Instead, Johnson published a letter that in essence made the report public and thus breached the trust of the committee. The committee increased the penalty imposed on Johnson for breach of trust. [This is in character. Johnson resigned his seat earlier this week and promptly found himself employment as a columnist for the Daily Mail. Former Prime Ministers and ministers are supposed as “good chaps” to notify the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments (ACOBA) so that the committee can advise whether a proposed appointment is proper. Johnson notified ACOBA 30 minutes before announcing his new role and declared that he had followed the proper process.]

 

The vote in the House is a big moment. We will discover which members of our Parliament have the integrity and understanding of their constitutional duty to defend our constitution, and which are beguiled (or bullied) into a betrayal of trust by a moral wretch who has been exposed for that he is. In short, it is time for good chaps to act.

 

 

 

A Takeaway for Lupita

 

Meet Lupita, a little girl who lives in the Bahía de Banderas area of Mexico. As our son Chris explains:

“Lupita is now 10 years old, but started at Pasitos de Luz when she was just 8 months. She was born prematurely, and then suffered a major head injury in a serious car accident at 2 months old. This resulted in Lupita experiencing major psychomotor delay. When she arrived at Pasitos de Luz, she could make no voluntary movements whatsoever and entered straight into our physiotherapy program. Almost 10 years later, Lupita has taken another major step in her rehabilitation; she has officially started school!”

Lupita in the physiotherapy room at Pasitos de Luz

 

We support the work of Chris and his colleagues at Pasitos de Luz (https://pasitosdeluz.org/) in various ways. One is serving to our neighbours a Mexican takeaway in return for a voluntary donation. This time we had a little extra help from Diana, a chef from Mexico City, who now serves delicious mole negro (a black sauce of chiles, chocolate and several other ingredients), enchiladas in green sauce, and who made for our takeaway Jan’s favourite (and very indulgent) pastel de tres leches (cake of three milks: condensed, evaporated and full cream). Diana and Alvin run Cielitos restaurant in very un-Mexican Virginia Water.

 

Jan and I provided the rest of the meal:

 

Ensalada de nopalitos: a salad of prickly pear leaves, tomato, red onion, coriander leaves and feta cheese, dressed with lime juice and olive oil

 

 

Ensalada de frijoles y hongos: a salad of three types of beans, mushrooms, celery, grated parmesan, and plenty of parsley, with a vinaigrette dressing

 

Tinga poblana de pollo: tinga is a sauce whose key ingredients are chipotle (smoked jalapeño) chiles, onion, tomato, parsley and coriander

 

Pastel de calabacitas, piña y nueces: courgette, pineapple and nut (in this case pistachios) cake

 

We rewarded ourselves with a margarita before eating our own takeaway.

In anticipation of a margarita

 

 

Our neighbours’ donations will help more children who need the kind of support provided by Pasitos (https://pasitosdeluz.org/) to emulate the progress that Lupita has made:

“Her vocabulary is expanding and she can now name all five vowels. She can identify colours and different animals, and brush her teeth by herself. We have also been working with Lupita on her emotions, as she enters puberty, helping her to express herself when she feels happy, excited or sad. We have been teaching Lupita patience and the importance of sharing. We would love for her to be able to write her own name.”

Lupita learning about colours

 

Landscapes of power

I have lived in Sunninghill, Berkshire, for 41 years since Jan and I returned from a few years in Washington, DC. I am now one of a small group of volunteers that organizes events at our village public library. Last October a neighbour, Professor Mick Crawley, a botanist and ecologist, took a group of us on an enthralling tour of our own village. I discovered how many things I had failed to notice about our local environment over the last four decades.

 

Mick is the author of the definitive study of Berkshire’s plants and ecology, in which he notes that “The modern village of Sunninghill is a working class enclave surrounded by the houses of the very wealthy. The little brick-built semi-detached houses were mostly erected between 1890 and 1914, as the population soared following the coming of the Southern Electric Railway.”[i] He might have added that there were also a few former woodmen’s cottages (small single-storey bungalows) here and there, which have been gradually succumbing to development and demolition in recent years. A curious feature of Sunninghill is that its church is not in the centre of the village, as one would expect, but in a rather out-of-the-way location in Church Lane, accompanied only by a few luxurious homes, on the other side of the busy A329 London Road. Mick explains that “Old Sunninghill, in contrast, was an ancient, pre-Norman settlement on the rounded hill tops surrounding the parish church at Ashurst, in what is now Silwood Park. Of these early cottages, no trace remains and most of them were ruthlessly cleared out when the estates were gentrified in the eighteenth century.”[ii]

 

We learned more of this history[iii] from our last library event before the autumn on 26 May when Mick led a tour of the grounds of Silwood Park. Silwood is now Imperial College London’s research centre for ecology, evolution and conservation. The campus, on the outskirts of Sunninghill, is a 20-minute walk from our home. Much of Mick’s talk, of course, was about botany and ecology, but he also explained to us that the design of the park’s landscape, and of our own community, reflects the geography of the powerful and of those who lacked power. 

Our tour of Silwood Park

 

 

Mesolithic flint axes tell us that farmers lived in our area about 10,000 years ago, and cream-coloured flint axes provide evidence of Neolithic farmers some 5,000 years ago. Bronze Age bell barrow burials have been excavated near Sunningdale station and there were similar barrows at Heatherwood Hospital in Ascot. Belgic tribes, the Atrebates, settled the area about 50 BC, and an appeal for help from an Atrebatic king prompted the Roman Emperor Claudius to invade Britain in AD 43. Although a Roman road runs 2km to the south of Silwood through what is now Heathrow Airport, Egham, Sunningdale and on to Silchester.  No Roman remains have been found around Sunninghill, because “This was sandy infertile heathland passed through only for necessity, and there was nothing to induce human beings to remain in Roman times.”[iv]

 

Some time between the departure of the Romans in AD 410 and the Norman Conquest a tiny Saxon hamlet existed on a hilltop in Nash’s Fields, now part of Silwood Park. The occupants were members of the Sunna or Sonna people, from whom Sunninghill (and its neighbour Sunningdale) derives its name. Silwood derives from “siele”, Old English for willow. From the 10^th century, the farmers of Nash’s Field were engulfed in the hunting forest of Christian Saxon Kings, who had a palace at Old Windsor.

 

The first church was established about 890. An ancient yew tree in the grounds of the current church is at least 1,000 years old and may have marked the site of a pagan shrine. The pre-Norman church was replaced by a stone building between 1120 and 1130[v], in the centre of glebe lands, given from the lands of the royal forest to sustain the vicar. By this time, the King’s hunting forest was fiercely policed by the keepers to prevent humble folk from hunting the monarch’s wild boar and deer. The residents of Nash’s field may well have worked for the King as deer keepers, kennel men, foresters or as some other kind of estate worker. Oak from Sunninghill was used to build Windsor Castle, St. George’s Chapel and Eton College.

 

By 1362 Sunninghill was a manor owned by a character called John de Sunninghill whose property included a manor house, farmland and woodland and a few cottages. A deed of 1582 calls the manor house Eastmore (“east of the moor of Ascot heath”), located on high ground above Silwood Farm (the farm house, part Tudor and part hideous modern, is still there). A succession of owners cultivated small arable fields, exploited the woodland and grazed sheep on meadowland. In the 1670s the manor land and Silwood Farm were acquired by the Aldridge family, who made their money from timber, leather and farming during the Civil War. The family owned the estate for about a century, during which it leased the land to tenants, while the Aldridges devoted themselves to more profitable enterprises.

 

Wealthy and powerful as the Ashridges were, Sunninghill offered no greater opportunities than it had in Roman times, but then in 1711 Queen Anne introduced horse racing to Ascot Heath. Ascot and Sunninghill suddenly became a fashionable destination. The wealthy were further attracted by the “health-giving springs” at the Wells, originally a farmhouse, but by the 17^th century an inn. With the advent of horse racing, the Wells, which combined health-giving waters with a strategic location by the start of the races, became a fashionable and luxurious destination.

 

The place once shunned by Romans now attracted the rich and famous, and was a desirable place to own a grand home, preferably without the humble farmers who had toiled there for centuries. One such was a wealthy banker, Sir James Sibbald, who purchased Silwood in 1787. In 1795 he built Silwood Park, a white Georgian residence designed by the Scottish architect Robert Mitchell (fl.1770-1809). To provide the ideal setting for his new home Sibbald commissioned the landscape architect Humphry Repton to design an elegant landscape for his new home, including an artificial lake. 

 

Sibbald's mansion

 

Sibbald lost no time in ensuring that he could enjoy his new estate undisturbed by the lower orders. Like other landowners in the area, Sibbald had at his disposal the Enclosure Acts, which ordered that all land be assigned to registered owners. Between 1790 and 1817 powerful men like Sibbald reduced the common land of the area from about 2,000 acres to a mere 112 at a stroke. Needless to say, the peasants who exercised their traditional rights to grazing, cutting peat and the like, were never to be the beneficiaries of this process. All those on Sibbald’s newly regularized land were expelled and their homes razed to the ground. By way of meagre compensation, a new Bog Trust was established in 1817 to allow the expelled peasants to cut peat and timber from the bog in South Ascot, which is still common land. So, the wealthy got elegantly landscaped estates, the local farmers a bog.

Nash's Field, the original site of Sunninghill (photo by Mick Crawley)

 

 

Repton's artificial lake

 

In 1854 an owner of railways and a Lancashire cotton mill, John Hargreaves, Jr., bought the Silwood estate from the widow of a Mr. Forbes. Hargreaves died in 1874 and the estate was sold to Charles Patrick Stewart, a partner in a steam locomotive manufacturing company, in 1875. Stewart demolished Sibbald’s Georgian mansion (he considered the rooms too small for his guests), and commissioned a new building at the other end of the park, removed from the smells of Silwood Farm. The architect of the new mansion was Alfred Waterhouse (1830-1905), who designed the Natural History Museum in London. The new house was designed as a party venue, convenient for Ascot race course. The ground floor was an enormous ballroom. Overlooking the ballroom on the first floor was a gallery, which gave access to large and luxurious bedroom suites suitable for Stewart’s guests, who included the sons of Queen Victoria.

Waterhouse's Silwood house

 

 

During the second World War the house became a military hospital. Nissan huts were built in the grounds to house staff. This combination of luxury and utility was purchased in 1947 by Imperial College. A few of the WWII buildings survive: the former sergeant’s mess is the student canteen and bar. As we walked home from Mick’s tour Jan and I encountered a PhD student carrying to his room  a lunch of fish fingers and chips, which might well have satisfied a wartime sergeant.

 

Wealthy landowners were not the only force that has shaped the Silwood Park landscape. Mick informed us that the Waterhouse mansion once had an unimpeded view of Ascot race course across the Repton landscape, until in 1953 myxomatosis reached the UK from France. The disease devastated the rabbit population of Silwood, whose voracious appetites had kept open the view of Ascot. Now that they no longer had to compete with rabbits, a variety of tree species established themselves, and a handsome wood now obscures the view of the race course.

 

One of the glories of Silwood is its population of oak trees. Every species of oak that can survive in a northern temperate climate is represented. In 1982 Mick established an experiment to monitor 30 English oaks. The quantity of acorns produced by these trees has been monitored since then, to establish a long-term record of annual acorn production (calculated by counting the numbers of acorns, a task that must require considerable patience) and the effect of the invasive Knopper gall wasp on the reproductive output of the trees. The trees have not meekly submitted to the attacks of the wasps: years of low acorn production alternate with higher acorn yields that out-compete the predators. Last year’s production was a record.

 

Mick explains the 1,000 years plus life cycle of the oak quite simply: 500 years to grow, 500 years of adult life, 500 years to die. In the last phase, trees shed limbs to conserve resources, and after death provide an ecosystem for other organisms to flourish.

 

Repton’s man-made lake is fed by two streams, one clear and the other one of Sunninghill’s several red iron-rich streams (like the waters taken at the Wells). The red colour is produced by bacteria, which thrive on the iron salts and form a gelatinous red substance.

 

As Mick observes in his book, an unusual number of estates and grand residences occupied land near Sunninghill. Across Buckhurst Road, the road to Windsor, from Silwood was The Oaks (now a hotel), home to Charles Churchill, grand-nephew of the first Duke of Marlborough. Close by was Buckhurst Park, its house a mix of neo-Tudor and neo-Georgian styles, built on land from which the peasant residents of Bucket Hill were evicted.  From 1891 Buckhurst was the country seat of Sir Joseph Savory (1843-1921).  A few yards along the London Road is Tittenhurst Park, a 72-acre estate where a Georgian house was built in 1737. In 1869, Thomas Holloway, the founder of Royal Holloway college in Egham, lived there. Later owners included John Lennon and Yoko Ono, who sold it to Ringo Starr in 1973. Ringo, his wife and son were still there when we moved to Sunninghill in 1982. He sold the estate to a United Arab Emirates potentate in 1988. A short distance further on was Sunningdale Park, its house designed about by James Wyatt (1746-1813). Wyatt was also responsible for the late 18^th century rebuilding of a 17^th century house in Sunninghill Park, originally enclosed as a hunting park in 1377. Mick’s book lists several more estates in a remarkably small area, several of which have disappeared and been replaced by housing developments at various times.[vi]

Tittenhurst Park

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[i] The Flora of Berkshire (Harpenden, Hertfordshire: Brambleby Books, 2005), 204

[ii] Ibid

[iii] Most of the history that follows is adapted from The Flora of Berkshire chapter 5, “SIlwood Park and its History,” 215-242. Some information was also taken from the Wikipedia entry on Silwood Park.

[iv] The Flora of Berkshire, 216

[v] The late Norman church was replaced in the 19^th century by the current building: Ibid., 243

[vi] The Flora of Berkshire, 244-252