Chris

Lady Nugee has deliberately engineered your confusion by choosing to describe a single-track lane on a private estate a ‘driveway’, thereby insinuating that it’s the viscount’s personal access for getting his car into his garage. That is not the case.

There are certainly questions to answer here but as always, deliberately mischaracterising what has actually happened ensures they won’t be addressed. Such is the state of our politics.

As far as I can gather, the Estate company actually did pay for a substantial portion of the work of repairing the road. Their input paid for the repairs on the section beyond the museum, towards the farms. The museum applied for, and won, a grant to repair the first half-mile of the road, which is used by museum visitors as well as farm vehicles. The question is whether maintenance of that section of road is the tenant’s or the landlord’s responsibility. As I live on a stretch of unadopted country road I can tell you, the answers to those sorts of questions can be extremely complex and often are the reason such roads end up in that sort of condition.

I doubt we will ever learn whether it was actually the museum’s responsibility to maintain that part of the road or whether the estate used the museum as a front to get access to public funds. To be honest it would make little difference if we did. The story is only out there because of its potential sleaze value and everyone hearing it is only likely to become more entrenched in whatever view they already had.