Own goal

It hasn’t been a great month for John Terry.

First Fabio Capello drops the philandering footballer from the England captaincy, and then private tenants say Mr Terry is their idea of a nightmare landlord. A survey by the National Landlords Association of tenants’ ‘dream celebrity landlords’ leaves Mr Terry languishing as the least popular, along with wife of the former PM Cherie Blair.

This damning verdict is hardly a surprise since Mr Terry seems barely able to keep his own house in order, let alone those of others. But Closed Circuit can’t help but question the voting tenants’ judgement for placing a cartoon character - Bob the Builder - as the fifth most popular landlord - apparently for his business skills.

Both Bob and John were beaten to the top spot by Philip Schofield, who was reckoned to be a friendly and sociable landlord who you could rely on in a crisis - presumably helped on his way by that dashing coat of many colours.

The Audit Commission’s lead housing inspector Domini Gunn-Pein seemed none too impressed with the performance of male attendees at the Chartered Institute of Housing’s south east conference earlier this month.

During a session about health, social care and housing she noted her audience consisted almost entirely of women. ‘If you look at last night’s dinner it was predominantly men,’ she observed. ‘Perhaps we should have had a free bar and more men would have turned up.’

Having previously upset the good people of Liverpool with his suggestion that their city had little to offer them, Tim Leunig has decided to go for a potentially more benign target.

The LSE boffin and Inside Housing columnist used last week’s National Housing Federation Leaders conference to make the case for developing on rural land. ‘I cannot see a field when I travel around Britain without thinking of the reduction in misery that would come about if that field was built on. Would anyone really notice?

‘I mean, sure, the Campaign to Protect Rural England can come up with Bill Bryson looking cuddly saying “This field was bigger than Birmingham”. Well yes, but there are millions of fields as big as Birmingham - just go to another field.’

Send your juicy gossip to closedcircuit@insidehousing.co.uk