He was also hysterically hostile to the prospect that any more people should be allowed to build a house close to the one his father built in the stockbroker belt.
'No to Mr Prescott's tide of concrete', wrote an emotional Mortimer: 'Our green and pleasant land simply cannot accommodate it.' As so often in this kind of rhetoric, the contrast is between rural idyll, and urban depravity - 'these fields and forests are havens of peace and sanity, refuges from the disintegrating chaos of the modern world, and now they are to be sacrificed' to 'New Labour's mania for concrete'.[Daily Mail 31 July 2003] 'Southern England is to be a land concreted with up to one and a half million new houses, all well supplied with supermarkets and service stations but with absolutely no room for any glorious Jerusalem.'
Of course it was a complete myth. No new houses were built. In fact house-building fell to an all-time low.