I am a mild-mannered man. It takes a lot to get my goat. But when an Uxbridge constituent showed me around his new family home, I thought I was about to blow a gasket.

It was a potentially lovely home, in what should be a fantastic development, and he had not only laid out his entire savings but had also taken out a huge mortgage. So we looked together, with horror, at what he had been sold. He had a bay window over the front door so lackadaisically constructed that it was in danger of toppling into the street. There were yawning cracks in the walls of the (unusable) bedroom behind, and he had been obliged to prop up the window with a kind of scaffolding portico.

I suppose I might have mastered my indignation if he had been the only one to complain; but over the past months a stream of constituents have come with similar eye-popping tales: of rooms freezing from draughts; of doors and windows that would not close; and in one case of workmen so simply don’t-care-ish that they had actually plastered a live cat in a wall, like the victim in the Edgar Allan Poe story about the cask of Amontillado.