I go all the way around the park listening to the Men from the Ministry: Our heroes face a terrible fate Mildred has lost her boyfriend Priceless. Go and visit Mary sell two books tidy up. Sir William Benyon, who has died aged 84, was an innovative Berkshire landowner and for 22 years Conservative MP for what became the new town of Milton Keynes. After Benyon was mugged outside the gates of his estate, she wrote him a three-page letter of commiseration.
With his father in poor health, Bill took on the estate, which was run down and saddled with 80 per cent death duties. A condition of the bequest — which was completely unexpected — was that they change their name to Benyon. Over the years Benyon cleared the debt, modernised the estate and added to it until it comprised 14, acres in Berkshire and Hampshire, always encouraging the concept of family farms and helping young entrants into farming.
He put the estate into a trust from which he drew no benefits, and more recently it has been run by his elder son Richard, who followed him into the Commons as MP for Newbury. Sir David Price. Lord Kimball. Sir Julian Critchley. Sir Michael Neubert. He made his mark in the Commons with a series of Bills to tighten the law on abortion. No sooner had Benyon been elected than the Roskill Commission nominated Cublington, near Buckingham, as the third London airport, and Benyon led the successful campaign to kill off the project.
The highlight was a protest cavalcade he organised. Instead of an airport, his constituency played host to a new town, a project which Benyon embraced with enthusiasm. When, in , his fast-growing constituency was split between the safe Tory Buckingham and the unpredictable Milton Keynes, Benyon unhesitatingly went for the latter.
The constituency was split in two without waiting for a national boundary review, each part initially returning a Conservative. Aged 13 he was sent to Dartmouth, where he passed out as Chief Cadet Captain, and in he was commissioned into the Royal Navy, his career culminating in a staff job under the Governor of Kenya, Sir Evelyn Baring, during the Mau Mau emergency.
