I am a property writer, covering both the UK and overseas markets - from affordable homes to country estates. I hope to give punchy comment on housebuilding industry issues - praising the good, damning the bad, ignoring the ugly - all with a light dusting of humour and sport and family life covered too. I welcome your feedback.

Last week as the Telegraph’s predictable, hysterical Hands Off Our Land campaign rolled on, Matt, the newspaper’s brilliant cartoonist, sketched about new homes being built on Downton Abbey’s front lawn.

I wrote a letter to The Daily TeIegraph, wondering if the paper’s campaign partners the National Trust appreciated the irony. Several years ago the National Trust built new homes on the historic Cliveden estate and the 2nd Duke of Buckingham was even posher than Robert, Earl of Grantham.

The Telegraph did not publish my letter, as heaven forbid, that might constitute an opposing rational view on the draft National Planning Policy Framework furore.

Actually they probably did not publish it because I went on to say: “After the success of your magnificent MPs Expenses revelations, you have another media award sewn up - the ‘hysterical one-eyed pandering to readership’ award.”

Stand by for ‘Thousands could die if the Government’s planning reforms go ahead’. It’s about the only hysterical headline The Telegraph has not run. Yet.

I could have spared the sub-editors a lot of work, for the one and only true headline surrounding the debate is ‘Not In My Back Yard.’ And let’s face it we’re all guilty on that score.

Meanwhile I’ve been having a bit of a Twitter spat with the National Trust. To be fair the conservation charity politely replies from time to time. But it did not respond when I asked them how it could publish a video on its website which said that the central tenet of the Coalition’s NPPF was ‘a presumption in favour of development.’

Obviously to sustain their one-eyed prejudices it was not practical to sustain the word sustainable. So hey just leave it out and broadcast utter fiction.

I was told by other tweeters - presumably those secure in their country homes oblivious to the fact that the young of the village cannot hope to own a property in this life or the next – to lay off the sacred National Trust. Sorry, I’m not throwing in the tea towel just yet.

The Trust boasts more than 100,000 signatures on its petition. Well 100,000 people can be wrong when they are told that the field where they walked the dog this morning will tomorrow be encased in concrete. I’m exaggerating, but they started it.

A leader in the Telegraph said government ministers were using “alarmist language to defend the policy shift.”

Yet the paper’s environment editor Geoffrey Lean wrote: “the proposals threaten to open the door to a virtually unregulated proliferation of concrete.” Now that’s alarmist.

Another piece by the same writer is illustrated with a picture of Lathkill Dale in the Peak District, with the caption “Now you see it…”

Blimey, putting houses in a beautiful, steep, limestone valley with rare orchids on a Site of Special Scientific Interest and a National Nature Reserve would be the greatest feat of building since Stonehenge. Not even the combined firepower of Tony Pidgley and Steve Morgan would get that one through planning.

With brutal irony the Telegraph, illustrating another raft of anti-development letters, used a 1930s watercolour by my great-uncle Eric Ravilious entitled: ‘New Bungalow.’

But the last word goes to Peter Iden from Devon, whose Telegraph letter somehow got through.

‘Sir – a developer is someone who wants to build a house in the country. A conservationist is someone who owns one.’

Rupert Bates is editorial director of www.whathouse.co.uk and Show House magazine (www.showhouse.co.uk

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