It’s in here! Ed-stone made for No 10 tracked down to bleak London warehouse
And boss of stonemasons who carved it reveals he’s a ‘true-blue’ Tory
HAD things gone differently, it would now be casting a dark shadow across the Downing Street rose garden.
Instead Ed Miliband’s infamous stone, inscribed with his six election pledges, is gathering dust in a moss-covered warehouse on a windswept industrial estate.
The Mail tracked down the resting place of the 8ft 6in monolith in south London. And, in a final humiliation, the maker of the slab has admitted he was a ‘true blue’ Tory who did not vote for Mr Miliband.
At a high profile launch in Hastings a few days before the election, Labour said the stone would go to Number 10 as a reminder of the party’s promises. But it instantly became a source of ridicule, nicknamed the ‘Ed Stone’ on social media with Mr Miliband mockingly compared to Moses.
As it became clear the stunt had spectacularly backfired, a truck with a giant claw attachment collected the one ton slab from Hastings the morning after it was made public. Labour officials refused to make any comment on its whereabouts, and it remained hidden for the rest of the election campaign.
But the Mail has discovered it was transferred to a warehouse owned by Paye, a stone conservation company, located, ironically, on the Westminster industrial estate in Woolwich. The building has none of the glamour of Whitehall however. Instead it has a rusting and mosscovered roof and whitewashed windows. It is surrounded by skips full of building debris.
A worker described the storage site as ‘full of stones – stacks and stacks of them’. He said: ‘You wouldn’t be able to find it in there if you wanted to. Everything is boxed up or wrapped, so it’s hard even for me to tell one from another.’
Paye’s chief executive, Adrian Paye, declined to comment on the pledge stone or allow any access to it, saying the company had many high profile clients who insisted that their work was kept private. Asked if there were any plans to move it from the Woolwich warehouse, he replied: ‘It’s a storage facility. We keep things there until people ask to have them moved.’
The company specialises in looking after and repairing historic stones from national monuments.
The pledge stone was made by Stone Circle and collected from the family firm’s Basingstoke offices the day before i t was unveiled in Hastings. The company’s joint director, Jeff Vanhinsbergh, said he was unable to discuss details of the making of the stone or its cost – estimated at £30,000 – because he had signed a confidentiality clause with the Labour Party.
But he joked: ‘If it was David Cameron it might be a different story. I’m a true blue. It does seem that stone was the final nail in the coffin for Ed Miliband.
‘I do feel a bit sorry for him as I’m sure it wasn’t his idea and he was just doing what his strategists told him. But whoever did come up with the idea, oh dear. It looked like he was trying to recreate the Ten Commandments.
‘I must admit I did chuckle the day after it was revealed when I was shown all the mock-up pictures of Mr Miliband as Moses.’
Founded in 1968 by Mr Vanhinsbergh’s father, Bernard, Stone Circle has 30 staff and showrooms in Basingstoke and Newbury. It takes on specialist stone projects and created part of the Diana Memorial Fountain in Hyde Park.
Mr Miliband said when he unveiled the stone: ‘ These six pledges are now carved in stone. They are carved in stone because they won’t be abandoned after the election.’
But John Rentoul, Tony Blair’s biographer, described it as the ‘most absurd, embarrassing, childish, silly, patronising, ridiculous gimmick I have ever seen’.
London Mayor Boris Johnson dubbed it ‘the heaviest suicide note in history’. And Simon Blackwell, creator of the cult BBC political satire The Thick of It, suggested it was beyond parody, tweeting: ‘Ed Miliband builds a policy cenotaph. And you wonder why we stopped doing The Thick of It?’
‘Final nail in the coffin’