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How Kenneth Clarke and Chris Grayling’s failed commercial venture cost us the taxpayer over £1m

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Chris Grayling: Transport Secretary and The Lord Voldemort of the Cabinet
The secretive and expensive world of the miniistry of justice

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An extraordinary report published by the National Audit Office today on ” Just Solutions” – the commercial arm of the Ministry of Justice set up by former Lord Chancellor Kenneth Clarke – reveals that taxpayers have lost over £1m on the failed venture.

Remember this was promoted by Chris Grayling so the Ministry of Justice could make money by selling prison expertise to regimes with appalling judicial systems like Saudi Arabia and Oman. It was closed down by Michael Gove when he became justice secretary after the election.

Now the NAO reveals that not only was this unethical but it actually cost the taxpayer money. Indeed one can see how desperate the government might have been to sign a  £5.9 m contract with Saudi Arabia and further contracts with Oman – as this would have been the only way it could have made a profit out it.

Instead over four years  from 2012 to this year  it lost £302,000, £390,000 £317,000  and £141,000 respectively. leading to a £ 1,150,000 cumulative loss for the taxpayer.

And its scope was much wider than people realised with projects in Nigeria, the Seychelles, Libya, Estonia, Mauritius, Bermuda, the Cayman Islands as well as private study visits to drum up business in China, Bangla Desh, Turkmenistan and India.

As the NAO found: ” The cost of setting up JSi exceeded the income generated by completed contracts. We estimate that JSi’s costs were approximately £2.1 million from 2012 until its closure, including £239,000 on consultancy services. Therefore JSi made a net loss of approximately £1.1 million in this period. This is due, in part, to the decision to withdraw from prospective arrangements with Saudi Arabia and Oman.”

The report discloses that it had big plans for Oman.

“The initial proposal, Phase 1, was for a small piece of work to critique the plans of an
existing prison and was valued at £98,000. This was expected to be followed by work
to develop a new prison in Oman, Phase 2, valued initially at approximately £4 million
but later negotiations increased this to £7.8 million. In addition, preliminary discussions
were held in 2014 with the Omani government around a national training programme.”

Grayling also spent £6500 fighting off a judicial review  of its activities before the organisation was closed by Michael Gove.

This is all a far cry from the boasts in the Ministry of Justice six monthly report saying it was all contributing to the ministry’s budget and supposed to be saving the taxpayer money. Instead it was racking up debts.

This a sorry tale for anybody who has a shred of ethics and thought Britain should not be helping regimes that flog and behead offenders. Bur the fact that it lost money doing it is  a  further damning indictment of the government and Chris Grayling.

As Meg Hillier, chair of the public accounts committee, said yesterday:  “When Just Solutions International was closed down it had made an overall loss of £1.1 million despite a commitment that it would be self-funding by April 2013.

“Despite being a commercial venture, it generated less than £1 million income over three years.

“I am concerned by the loss of taxpayers’ money on this failed venture, and the Ministry of Justice’s ongoing work with countries with questionable human rights records.”

 

 

Theresa May’s new immigration official: the private landlord

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Home Office 2005

Home Office HQ: running ” an ineffective and possibly racist ” scheme

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On Monday Britain’s immigration officials are to be swelled by millions of new recruits – an army of private landlords.

February 1 marks the day landlords  and any private home owner  who takes in lodgers will be expected to act as immigration officers and check the immigration status of anybody renting a room. British, Swiss and EU citizens are exempt. But anyone with a foreign sounding name, black face or Aussie or American accent will immediately  be under suspicion.

Failure to do so will mean that private landlords  face a fine of  up to £3000 (less for a first offence) and even once they are registered the landlord faces another fine if he or she fails to tell the Home Office when the lodgers’ visa runs out.

According to James Brokenshire, the immigration minister, it is all very easy and should prove no burden to millions of British citizens who let out rooms or have buy to lets.

As he says “Ahead of the scheme’s roll out, we have been working very closely with an expert panel to make sure their feedback is taken on board and to design a scheme that is as simple and light touch as possible. Many responsible landlords have already been undertaking similar checks – these are straightforward and do not require any specialist knowledge.”

Apart from his insult to thousands of professionally trained immigration staff, James Brokenshire’s comment is wide of the mark. As I wrote in Tribune magazine last week the scheme is so simple that the Home Office’s  so called new ” simple guide” for landlords issued on January 8 was suddenly withdrawn and archived seven days later.

The reason became very clear. it was pretty complicated and required landlords to be able to distinguish between fake immigration papers and real ones.

The government’s brilliant test run has proved not to be so. Trialled in the West Midlands in places like Birmingham, Wolverhampton and Sandwell, it turned out that half the landlords never registered and it was difficult to find out who was taking lodgers. Some people relying on agents decided the best thing was not to take any foreign people at all, and the dangers of racism was obvious.

This suggests it could be difficult to enforce, particularly over lodgers. Nobody need be registered if they are staying less than three months. The rules say tenants leaving most of their belongings in a property for more than three months or are registered to vote or with a local doctor would have to be checked. And will  cash strapped local councils have time or inclination to check.

They also want landlords to certify the documents are genuine, the picture is of the immigrant and to be wary of damaged documents.

In my view this another example of the government dumping its responsibility to check immigrants coming into Britain on to the general public rather than having an effective and well staffed Borders Agency in the first place.

But it will also be ineffective. My  knowledge is limited  and is mainly through connections to the Kurdish community after my daughter married a Kurdish asylum seeker – who now has a UK passport.

But it seems clear to me that each community sticks to its own – and is a mixture of people who have British passports, are awaiting asylum applications, and are illegal. The  accommodation arrangements  for the latter  are informal and wouldn’t be covered by the new Immigration Act as no contracts would be signed. So unless Mr Brokenshire is going to ask the police to raid the house of every former immigrant in England he will never  discover what is really happening.

Instead he has dumped a bureaucratic system  on millions of law abiding citizens as a ” window dressing ” operation to cover up his government’s failure to police the immigration system itself.

 

 

 

Leaked Savile Report: The BBC culture that failed to protect people from abuse

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BBC Broadcasting House
Jimmy Saville presents BBC Top Of The Pops in the early 1970s. (Photo by Michael Putland/Getty Images)

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Dame Janet’s highly critical report on the BBC’s handling of Jimmy Savile leaked to me  pinpoints  very serious issues at the Corporation which are still not resolved.

The official response from Tony Hall, the director general of the BBC, that this was a dark day for the BBC and it is all in the past does not wash.

Nor frankly does Dame Janet Smith’s plea to ignore this “early” draft. All the evidence  from people was taken before it was compiled and she has said she has not changed her conclusions. So will she rewrite it now?

Her draft report is not a whitewash. It is a closely argued analysis revealing a culture that allowed considerable sex abuse to flourish at ground floor level without a mechanism to report this to the top. This does not seem to have  changed and has conveniently let all the BBC’s top executives off the hook.

It reveals a  crass deferential attitude to celebrities – who could do anything they liked because they were ” untouchable” and people looked the other way. This is no different today – given the present cult of celebrity.

It also reveals an organisation that is more concerned with its public reputation that tackling the root of the problem- how to stamp out opportunities for sexual abuse.

Not only were under age  adolescents and children the victims of sexual abuse but so were  staff employed by the BBC – who did not complain because they wanted to keep their jobs.

And if anyone complained it seemed the BBC was woefully inadequate in investigating what happened – if it did indeed want to get to the real truth. That failure extended to its own investigations into the issue by its own investigative journalists who found their work dropped or sidelined.

When the BBC does publish the report it will have a lot of explaining to do. On the central issue of child sex abuse Dame Janet concludes that there could still be a paedophile lurking in the BBC and thinks the chance of this being exposed is now worse than then – because many people are on short term contracts and would worry if they could work again.

Her findings directly contradict a report commissioned by the BBC last year from the firm Good Corporation which praises the BBC’s policies in preventing a repeat of child sex abuse. Which is right?

Also it is still clear  the whistle blowing process at the BBC, is, at best, not properly promoted ( say the Good Corporation) or worse, virtually non existent  (  says Dame Janet’s review).

So I don’t think anyone should be fobbed off by complacent attitudes from the BBC and attempts to move the debate to the dim and distant past,. The BBC failed a group of survivors of sexual abuse by doing nothing then – and could be doing the same now.

Exaro Exclusive: Dame Janet Smith’s criticism of the BBC over Savile

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Jimmy Savile : Credit: BBC clip

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On the day Dame Janet Smith finally promised to publish her findings into the activities of paedophile Jimmy Savile in the BBC Exaro has published the main points in her draft report which examined and analysed what happened at our major broadecaster.

The report is a devastating critique of  the BBC’s culture in the 1970s and 1980s where ” talent” was ” untouchable”, managers were ” above the law” and there was a heavy drinking culture among top executives.

Her report outlines multiple rapes and indecent assaults on girls and boys, and incidents of “inappropriate sexual conduct” with teenagers above 16, all “in some way associated with the BBC”. Altogether there were over 60 victims and possibly up to 100 people had heard rumours about his activities, but nearly all at shop floor rather than managerial level.

“Three of Savile’s victims were only nine years old.”

Many BBC employees told Smith’s “review” that they had heard about Savile’s predatory sexual conduct, but feared reporting concerns to managers. But Smith accepts a series of denials by senior figures that they were aware of Savile’s sexual misconduct.

Most of Savile’s rapes, attempted rapes and more serious sexual assaults took place in his flats or caravans, she says.

“However, I heard of incidents that took place in virtually every one of the BBC premises at which he worked. These included the BBC Television Theatre (in connection with Jim’ll Fix It), at Television Centre (in particular in connection with Top of the Pops), at Broadcasting House or Egton House (where he worked in connection with BBC Radio 1), Lime Grove studios and various provincial studios, including Leeds, Manchester and Glasgow.

Exaro reveals today how Smith’s draft report:

We also publish the key extracts from the Smith report’s summary and conclusions, and from its damning chapter on the BBC’s management culture.

I will comment about this in a later blog but the revelations as anyone can see are wide ranging and very substantial.

 

 

Sneaky and Naive: The Department of Health’s plan to raise care home inspection fees

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Care quality Commission

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While MPs were enjoying their Christmas break the Department of Health sneaked out a consultation paper planning a massive increase in compulsory inspection fees for care homes, privately provided ambulance services and hospitals.

As part of the spending settlement the ministry has decided to recoup the present £120m  a year subsidy given to cover compulsory inspections made by the Care Quality Commission. Altogether the ministry want to recoup some £780m over a ten year period. I have written about this in Tribune magazine

There is a subsidy is because the CQC has had to up its game and do more through inspections after the scandals exposed by  the Robert Francis report into Mid-Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust and the Winterbourne View private home for people with learning difficulties exposed by BBC Panorama.

The Treasury wants to abolish this subsidy on the grounds that it must recover all the costs of inspections rather than part of them.. Superficially this sounds fine as NHS trusts will not to have to pay for the inspection of their own hospitals and ambulance services. Neither will 94 per cent of GP surgeries.

However increasing privatisation and outsourcing of services by local authorities and health trusts to private firms means that the bill for the inspections which already run into thousands of pounds could fall on councils and trusts who commission the services.

The paper reveals that 90 per cent of  care services are already privatised and privatisation is increasing in the NHS with private ambulance providers becoming the norm and mental health provision and other services being outsourced.

To try and justify this civil servants have tried to tell ministers that this could have nil effect on health provision.

This naive view is bolstered by the belief that care homes s will accept a cut in their profits to prevent an adverse health outcome caused by councils and health trusts having to cut the number of people sent there because of the increased cost of inspection fees.

This is contradicted by negotiations for the present year’s fee increases. The paper says:

“There is a risk that any increases in fees could have a destabilising effect on providers, as many providers are facing a tough financial climate, with increased running costs and reductions in income. During the CQC’s consultation into their fee levels for 15/16, 80% of providers opposed the proposed 9% fee increases for this reason. “

This is hardly surprising given that to run a care home on a profit, they already pay staff little more than the minimum wage and cash strapped councils are unlikely to pay them any more for residents. It puts into question whether running a care home  is a suitable business for the private sector. Soon they will soon have to pay the living wage. So would anyone believe they will absorb higher inspection fees into their profit margins.

 

The paper also discloses that the review will mean they will cut inspection fees for private dentists as they make a profit. It then naively assumes that the dentist will pass on the saving to patients. Does anyone believe that?

Whoever drew up these proposals cannot really live in the real world – no wonder ministers are told what they want to know rather than face reality themselves.

 

Fact and Fiction over Jeremy Corbyn’s first by election defeat of the year

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Jack Paton

Jack Paton: :Local hero Pic Credit: Cumberland News

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Guido Fawkes and the Daily Express couldn’t wait to jump on the fact that the Labour Party lost  the first council by election of the year last Thursday.

After all this was in a Labour ward in flood sodden Carlisle where Jeremy Corbyn turned up to help and talk to flood victims and they firmly  rejected Labour in favour of an Independent. Paul Staines was ecstatic predicting a deluge of losses for Labour next May as the party totally disintegrated under Jeremy Corbyn to be consigned to the dustbin of history.

But both Guido  and the Daily Express are guilty of sloppy journalism because if they had looked  or wanted to look more carefully things were not as they seemed.

Myth No 1 was that  the Labour vote collapsed as Carlisle voters following the reshuffle chaos decided Labour was finished. I bet they had more things to worry about clearing up their flooded homes than following what was going on in the Westminster bubble.

In fact the Labour share of the vote – in a low turnout of 18 per cent- marginally INCREASED – from 33.1 to 33.5 per cent.

The party that lost out more was the third placed Conservative candidate whose share of the vote DECLINED by 5.4 per cent. Funny that was not reported.

Myth No 2 was that the Independent got there by taking votes only from Labour. In fact as the excellent Britain Elects Twitter file pointed out last time it was a four cornered fight with UKIP and the Greens standing. UKIP got 14 per cent of the vote but after their disastrous performances in many council by-elections and  the Oldham West Parliamentary by-election, couldn’t even find someone to stand. So it looks as though this vote switched to the Independent.

The third point ignored by the press- and this is where sloppy journalism really takes the biscuit – is that the winning candidate is a local hero.

He is Jack Paton, a former veteran, and a long time campaigner of the old style ” pavement politics ” type which was pioneered in the past by the Liberal democrats.

As the local paper , the News and Star, reported :

“Mr Paton, who has also worked with cadets in Botcherby and is a well-known figure in the area, becomes the second sitting independent city councillor for the estate, with Robert Betton already representing this neighbourhood.

” Mr Paton recently led the transformation of a dilapidated building into a new base for Army cadets, with the conversion of a former hairdressers on Victoria Road and land behind it.

He has also previously campaigned on issues including buses in the area and on kerbs and pavements that he perceived as dangerous for wheelchair users.”

He has his own Facebook page and tweets as @sixtysjack. His Facebook page is full of congratulations from local residents and his family.

Where Jeremy Corbyn might want to take note is that he is an army veteran and a traditional working class supporter who backs our troops. He is the sort of person who would  have warmed to Kevan Jones, the junior shadow defence minister , who quit this week, and was grossly misrepresented by John McDonnell as a right winger.

In that sense the vote is a warning to Corbyn that Labour is a broad church and needs to decide how it is going to keep on side this type of voter. After all the next PM is 2020 will definitely not be an Independent.

 

 

Is a £1 million fine a drop in the ocean for Thames Water?

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thames water

Thames Water’s pollution started all of this with a £1m fine

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Today the Environment Agency is rightly triumphant in celebrating a £1 million fine against Thames Water for polluting the Grand Union Canal for  nine months in nearby Tring.

This is the highest fine imposed by the courts ever in history according to a release from the Environment Agency. But is it really going to hurt Thames Water apart from the bad publicity?

First of all the case. It was brought by the Environment Agency after Thames Water caused repeated discharges of polluting matter from Tring STW (Sewage Treatment Works) to enter the Wendover Arm of the Grand Union Canal in Hertfordshire between July 2012 and April 2013.

In May Thames Water pleaded guilty before Watford Magistrates Court to two charges under the Environmental Permitting (England and Wales) Regulations 2010. On Monday 4 January, at St Albans Crown Court the company was ordered to pay a fine of £1 million, costs of £18,113.08 and a victim surcharge of £120.

Their report goes on:

“The court heard that poorly performing inlet screens caused equipment at the works to block, leading to sewage debris and sewage sludge being discharged into the canal. The inlet screens should take out the majority of sewage debris referred to as ‘rag’ from the process, but the screens had repeatedly failed in this case.”

And it adds: ” The Environment Agency received complaints from the Canal and Rivers Trust and from the general public about pollution in the canal. Officers attended the site on several occasions, they saw sewage debris including panty liners and ear buds in the vicinity of the outfall.”

Thames Water now says it has put matters right at a cost of only £30,000 but it seems to have taken a rather long time to do it. In the meantime it put anglers and boaters at risk from infection.

It also frankly was heaping a lot of shit (literally) on volunteers who are working to restore the rest of the Wendover Arm of the canal so that it can be used again by anglers and boaters. You can see their work here.

Yet put in context the £1m fine with Thames Water’s activities. The latest interim  half yearly figures from the company show it had a turnover of £1 billion, made a £200 million plus profit and paid out  interim dividends of £25m. So the £1 million fine is just 0.5 per cent of six months profit.

And if taken on a yearly basis – the last full year profit was £364m of which £169m was distributed in dividends. Investors include pension funds and the Chinese.

More interestingly the Thames Water chief executive Martin Baggs entire package well exceeds the £1m fine. The accounts for 2014-15 show his package in the company is over £2m for services to the group. His £460,000 salary is boosted by £53,000 in benefits including a £36,000 housing allowance, £15,000 for a company car and £2000 private medical insurance. He has long term bonuses worth over £1m with payouts of nearly £350,00 planned for the next three years. And he has a handsome £115,000 contribution to his pension.

Put all this together and perhaps £1m should be the minimum Thames should pay for any pollution they cause.Perhaps fines of £10m or a personal deduction from fat cat salaries should also be included.

The public may be pleased with the level of the fine – but for the company it seems but a  few drops from its bank balance.

The blog in 2015: Driven by Aaronovitch and Amy Winehouse

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Chris Grayling last yearsigning the memorandum of understanding with the Saudis; Pic Credit: UsSembassy
Times columnist David Aaronovitch. Pic credit :Flickr
Cotton bay; The main pool

The unlikely combination of combative Times columnist  David Aaronovitch and the tragic pop star Amy Winehouse drove traffic to my blog last year.

I doubt either have met each other but in different ways it reflects the present obsession with controversial names and celebrity culture.

The Amy Winehouse blog is three years old and is a travelogue based on the fact that I found myself and my wife staying at the same tourist complex in St Lucia that acted as a retreat for Amy when she was chilling out from drugs. I suspect the film about her has driven the traffic but the blog got over 1500 hits last year – 50 per cent more than the combined total of the two previous years taking it to nearly 2700 hits.

David Aaronovitch’s critique of my journalism in The Times led to 3537 hits when I decided to respond – though it was eclipsed by my critique of Dominic Lawson’s take on the Leon Brittan alleged child sex abuse scandal which attracted 6447 views.

Interest in the case of child sex abuse survivor Esther Baker was reflected in two high scoring blogs- at 2674 for an analysis of the challenge facing Staffs Police in investigating her case and 2096 when the first arrest was announced.

The scandal over former justice secretary Chris Grayling seeking contracts from the despicable Saudi Arabian justice system – which this blog  and Tribune broke- was a big highlight – with 4250 hits when his successor Michael Gove faced court action and 2795 when the story originally broke.

Otherwise the biggest hits were reserved for the attempt to get rid of the Speaker, John Bercow, on the last day of Parliament – with 3933 on a piece criticising William  Hague’s botched action  in changing the election rules and 2497 on the midnight email to MPs from Julian Lewis MP which alerted everyone to the dodgy deal.

The most controversial blog has been my reporting of a Northern Ireland judge’s decision to compensate a paedophile for a campaign against him by one of his victims -comments were both virulent in their hatred and support for the judge.

Altogether the number of hits  recorded by WordPress on my blog – 127,725 were down from 182,000 the previous year. I also wrote fewer blogs as I was away some of the time. But this is not the full story as the blog is getting increasing additional traffic from Linked In, Facebook and is now run on Byline.com so I am not longer sure how many hits I am getting any more.

WordPress also records I have had hits from 155 countries. Over 80 per cent (107,000) is from the UK but there were over 7,700 from the United States and over 1000 each from Australia, Ireland and France. I have had just one hit from Iran, Syria, Armenia and the Turks and Caicos Islands to name but a few.

The blog’s rating on http://averypublicsociologist.blogspot.co.uk/ has gone up from number 62 to number 50 on the top independent bloggers This partly reflects my twitter following increasing to 8085.

For a small one man blog however it is gratifying that so many people are interested – given I do no promotion.

 

 

Armchair Audit: Sir Philip Dilley, the dilatory flood maestro

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Sir Philip Dilley Pic credit: gov.uk

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UPDATE JANUARY 11: Sir Philip resigned as chair of the environment agency today and will leave at the end of January. He will now have time to concentrate on his other directorships, play more golf and tennis, and spend more time in Barbados.

His resignation statement said: “I want to be clear that I have not made any untrue or misleading statements, apart from approving the statement about my location over Christmas that in hindsight could have been clearer.”

He also attacked the media for pursuing him but as Liberal Democrat leader Tim Farron said:“Many staff gave up their Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and New Year’s Eve. Their boss should have joined them. It seemed to many that this organisation was bereft of its formal leadership when it was most needed.” 

Conservative MP for Ribble Valley Nigel Evans said Sir Philip had now made the “right judgement call”.

 

So  Sir Philip Dilley, David Cameron’s appointment to replace Lord Smith as chair of the Environment Agency, couldn’t tear himself away from sunny Barbados to turn up to see first hand the failure of his agency to cope with Storm Desmond and Frank.

Today the man who attacked former Labour Cabinet minister Chris Smith for not turning up soon enough to see the disastrous floods on the Somerset levels is rightly being pilloried in the press for deciding to spend time with his family than see any of those unfortunate flood victims.

What was disingenuous as the Telegraph reported is that his press office hid the fact that home – at the age of 60 – is a luxury villa in Barbados and not in the UK. He has a flat in Marylebone, London.

He of course says “Everyone be everywhere all the time ” but then that is not surprising given the man has ten directorships, including his own company to run, as well as posts on the board of the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and Imperial College, London.

And the money – £100,000 a year for a three day week – is of course chicken feed compared to the sums of money he was getting at his last big job as executive chairman of the Arup Group Ltd – the £1 billion international civil engineering business – says he and his fellow 12 directors shared £5.75 million between. the highest paid director – presumably Sir Philip – got a magnificent £864,000 a year – including a very useful sum paid into his pension – which at the age of 60 he can start drawing down.

His Who’s Who entry declares his married his wife, June. late in 2003 and has three sons, and spends time playing golf and tennis in sunny Barbados. He also is a wine buff and opera lover.

To give him credit the Portsmouth born man  made his way up in Arup from a graduate engineer to chairman.

He is also one of David Cameron’s favourite businessman sitting on the Prime Minister’s Advisory Group from 2011 to 2013. He accompanied the Prime Minister on trade missions to India, China and Russia and was a guest at a state banquet given by The Queen for the Indian President.

So perhaps it is not surprising that he can’t devote too much time to this nuisance issue of flooding -but the salary must be a very useful sum to supplement his pension.

 

 

A rare accolade to ” Lawrence of Arabia “

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Lawrence of Arabia – a painting by his friend, Augustus John.

Lawrence of Arabia pic Credit BBC

Lawrence of Arabia: Pic credit:BBC

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While the press has been inundated by flooding stories and fears of terrorist attacks  by Islamic State in the run up to Christmas , the government slipped out a genuine good news announcement  for fans of ” Lawrence of Arabia “.

The heritage minister, Tracey Crouch, announced that Clouds Hill, the tiny home of T E Lawrence , near Wareham in Dorset has been given Grade II * status – an Historic England  accolade given to only a few hundred buildings in England. The ruling gives its special protection.

The decision  taken 80 years after Lawrence’s death has been given no coverage by the press but is a piece of living history for anyone interested in the complex life of Lawrence – an archaeologist, manic motorcyclist, writer, Arabist, military strategist and a First World War hero.

For the tiny cottage as The National Trust site  tells you is just as exactly Lawrence left it when he died in a tragic motorcycle accident in 1935. It has no electric light, the rooms are simple and austere.

As Deborah Williams, Listing Team Leader, West at Historic England, said in the press release:

“Clouds Hill deserved to be upgraded to Grade II* in recognition of the importance of Lawrence’s life and the particular place which the cottage held in his heart. In 1923 he rebuilt the once-derelict cottage dating from 1808, making the fittings and furnishings himself, so it is very evocative of his personality and interests.”

The cottage served as Lawrence’s retreat from barrack life where he would entertain his friends and wrote most of his famous books. Famous visitors included Lady Nancy Astor, Siegfried Sassoon and Augustus John.

There is an irony given the timing of the announcement when the Middle East is in flames and Syria a hell hole. For it was Lawrence with the British government’s blessing who stirred up the Arab revolt in 1916 against the Ottoman Turks, committing terrorist attacks on their rail line across Arabia. His story was immortalised in David Lean’s film Lawrence of Arabia.

It was Lawrence who championed the Arab cause only to be betrayed by the French and British in a secret agreement that set up the current artificial boundaries between Iraq and Syria now straddled by Islamic State.

One wonders whether history will repeat itself in 2016 when Russia, the US, Britain, Turkey and no doubt France decide the fate of Syria.

For those interested in Lawrence in the year of the centenary of the Arab Revolt there is a website  run by The T E Lawrence Society. Events next year include a symposium at St John’s College, Oxford, looking back at the Great Arab revolt in September. And there is an exhibition on the revolt next October at the National Civil War Centre in Newark, Nottinghamshire.

The cottage itself is currently closed but re-opens on March 8.