892 days ago
I have happy memories of childhood visits to my father’s parents in Appledore on Romney Marsh. One of thosee was in “helping” grandpa, Sir John Winnifrith, with his garden of which he was immensely proud. Big nets kept the birds away from an incredibly ordered and productive fruit and vegetable patch which he tended carefully keeping the weeds and slugs at bay.
1452 days ago
For seven years, as I described here, I have been noting the various ways that the National Trust has pursued a costly woke agenda, alienating its core supporters, and, as a result, being less able to deliver its core mission of saving historic buildings and lands. My Bennite grandfather, Sir John Winnifrith, who ran this body as its Director General, would, I am sure, have washed his hands of the NT in disgust by now, resigning his membership. This weekend, the Trust doubled up on its latest woke blunder: the publication of a detailed report which, effectively, branded one third of its properties as racist.
1775 days ago
My paternal grandfather, Sir John Winnifrith, was a Bennite so I’d imagine we would not see eye to eye on everything although, as an ardent Eurosceptic, we would have agreed on some things. I have noted before on this website, how as Director General of the National Trust, he thought the organisation’s remit was to preserve historic buildings and landscapes. Today the Trust is almost as woke as Prince Harry and wastes vast sums preaching to us all and annoying many of us who might be minded to back it. I am, for that reason, not a member.
1788 days ago
Some of you have suffered only three years of being branded thick, ignorant, xenophobic, narrow minded and racist since you voted to leave the EU. For my family there is 45 years of hurt. But on January 31 it is all over and so I have today invested a few quid for my own personal celebration, which I will – of course – record though it will probably be classed as a hate crime.
2665 days ago
Over the past few days I have written a couple of times about my grandfather, Sir John Winnifrith, a thoroughly respectable fellow who ran the National Trust and was a staunch Bennite opponent of the EU. He was intelligent, sober and obviously not what one might term glamorous. But his little sister Joan was rather different.
2794 days ago
In 1975 it was my paternal grandfather Sir John Winnifrith who went into battle against the EU, or the Common Market as it then was. His view of those who wanted a European superstate had not really changed from his time spent thirty years earlier in Churchill's war rooms although his main objection, as a Bennite, was that the EEC would screw the working classes. It did.
2842 days ago
As a father, I know how useful the goggle box can be as an assistant parent and thus after my mother's death my father understandably relented and bought us an old black and white TV. Who can blame a newly single parent from seeking assistance in this way. But for the first eight years of my life we lived without a TV and I think that I watched just three, or maybe four, programmes in that time.
3085 days ago
As the grandson of a prominent Bennite Eurosceptic from 1975 I look with interest at how Labour is just imploding in the current referendum as its core support is surging towards Brexit and away from Project Fear. I look at why and what happens next.
3117 days ago
I am no late arrival on the Eurosceptic ship. Euroscepticism is hard wired into my DNA. My father's father, the Bennite Sir John Winnifrith spoke for the "out" side in 1975. My mother's brother is Christopher Booker. How could I be anything other than an "outer"?
And so three years ago I designed a T-shirt which I have worn happily in Greece & England ever since. It's Time to Leave. The imposition of a Soviet hammer & sickle on the EU stars says it all about this most undemocratic of establishments.
As hatred of the EU has grown not only in Britain but
