M.P. attacks Daily Telegraph journalism over report she’s moving house

Devizes MP Claire Perry has been involved in an email spat with Daily Telegraph journalist Tim Walker who writes the newspaper’s daily Mandrake column.  He was asking her about ‘her accommodation arrangements after the break-up of her marriage to Clayton Perry.’

Under the headline ‘Charm Offensive’, Mr Walker wrote (issue of June 12): “When I ask the MP for Devizes whether it is true that she has put in an offer for a house in her constituency, she gives me both barrels.”

“’Can you explain the public interest here?’ she demands in an email. ‘This is unacceptable intrusion and you and your editor will have a lawyers’ letter imminently’.”

Mr Walker goes on: “Surely, I venture, there is a legitimate interest in whether an MP lives in the constituency or not. ‘Your source is giving you incorrect facts. Are you aware that someone from Wiltshire was arrested and prosecuted last week for threatening emails to me and the family? Any interest in that? Thought not.’  (See Marlborough News Online report.)

Mrs Perry continued: ‘This is more rubbish from a group of lazy journos.  Can you not just let me get on with my job please?’

Mr Walker ends his item: “If ever her parliamentary career comes to an end, a glittering future awaits this lady, I wager, in public relations.”

When she was selected as the Conservative Prospective Parliamentary Candidate for Devizes in November 2009, Mrs Perry said publicly she would live in the constituency.  She told the local newspaper: “I am looking forward to moving my family home into the constituency.”

And her (undated) profile on the official website of the South West Conservatives says the family “are currently in the process of moving to a new family home in the Constituency of Devizes.”

Mrs Perry still lives in a village near Salisbury.  The Perry family’s Grade II* listed home had been on the market for sometime – initially at £2,850,000. But according to one estate agent the house – which has five or six bedrooms (depending on which agent’s details you have read) and a separate cottage in the grounds and fishing rights on the streams that run through the grounds – was taken off the market last December.