Stately rebuke
Sir: Andrew Lycett's article (The Sad Decline of a Stately Pile', 21 September) is a depressing amalgam of ignorance, innu- endo and something uncomfortably close to racial prejudice, which would surely have been far more appropriately placed in the lower reaches of the tabloid press.
The main foundation of the article that Heveningham Hall was not being properly restored — is wholly false. In his attempt to upset English Heritage's verdict that 'the general standard of the restoration work carried out at Heveningham is satis- factory, and the condition of the Hall is cer- tainly no worse than that of many other Grade 1 country houses in private owner- ship', Mr Lycett uses two tabloid dodges. First he implies that English Heritage was not telling the truth, but was merely seeking to please the Department of the Environ- ment. The second ploy is less discreditable but much sillier. He seeks to suggest that the gossip of a few people visiting the Hall, whose knowlege of architecture may be on a par with his own, is somehow of greater weight than the opinions of architectural experts.
Astragal wrote in May that Hevening- ham's promised 'to be a model restoration' and that 'the Wyatt interior will live again in all its glory'. In the Telegraph magazine Christopher Simon Sykes wrote that the restoration work was 'a revelation' adding that since Mr al-Ghazzi's death 'the painstaking restoration work has continued. ... Even the paint work is being carried out using lead paint or distemper made in the authentic 18th-century manner. And Mr Tam Dalyell MP, who was initially hostile, said after a visit to the Hall that, 'it is quite simply the most careful and accurate, superlatively good restoration I have ever seen anywhere'. Mr Lycett, of course, sup- presses these views, preferring to rely on anonymous innuendo. So much for the restoration, now for the man. Pursuing his strategy of seeking to dis' parage Mr al-Ghazzi whenever possible, Mr Lycett says that, 'Mr al-Ghazzi first came to Britain in the late 1960s with a reputation as a middle man in the oil trade'. Unfortu- nately Mr Lycett who works, I understand, for the Times seems no better informed about his own paper than he is about Heveningham Hall. He concedes that Lord Thompson of Fleet, who bought the Times in the mid '60s, was one of the first direc- tors of Mr al-Ghazzi's 'flagship Gulf Devel- opment Corporation' (sic) — he can't even get the title right. But Mr Lycett does not say that Mr al-Ghazzi, as well as being a business associate, was a very close friend of Roy Thompson's and was highly praised in the latter's autobiography. At the time of Mr al-Ghazzi's death one of the directors of his Swiss company was Dr Nello Celio, a former President of Switzerland; a director of his French com- pany was the brother of President Mitter- rand. In• other words Mr al-Ghazzi was a wholly different man from the sort of shady character that Mr Lycett seeks to present. Was not Mr Lycett aware of all this ? If he was not, why did he, with the aid of The
LETTERS
Spectator, defame the dead without making any effort to discover the elementary facts ?
Ian Gilmour
House of Commons, London SW1
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