Stilettos and a $4,000 skirt: Melania Trump’s tree-planting outfit

The US first lady opted for total glamour when asked to dig a hole in the White House garden. But was her outfit remotely appropriate for the task in hand?

Melania Trump has been gardening again, planting an Eisenhower-era oak sapling in the White House grounds. It means that her gardening wardrobe has come under further scrutiny. Did she wear 4in Christian Louboutin stilettos to aerate the soil? Did she choose a $4,000 floral Valentino skirt for its horticultural motif? The first lady barely has to lift a gold-tipped ceremonial spade for the jokes to begin.

“Actually, that’s not a spade, it’s a shovel,” says the gardening expert Alys Fowler. “I suspect she was given that in recognition of the fact that she was never going to put her foot on it in those shoes.” Aside from the obvious issues, such as the propensity of stilettos to sink into the mud, Fowler is worried that Trump’s footwear is problematic. “If you are going to lean over and try to lift something quite heavy, that’s a real strain on your lower back.”

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How to get rid of mice and rats https://t.co/JA2Tq8fizE #conveymove #estateagentsnottingham https://t.co/GmjoJxU3bM

How to get rid of mice and rats https://t.co/JA2Tq8fizE #conveymove #estateagentsnottingham https://t.co/GmjoJxU3bM (via Twitter http://twitter.com/conveyandmove/status/1034667801649311744)

How to get rid of mice and rats Nottingham Estate Agents

As the colder weather arrives, rodents will start to look for ways to get inside a house. But how do you get them out once they settle in? OnTheMarket.com offers top tips. With winter approaching, it is not only human beings who feel the need to snuggle up in a warm home. Exactly the same […]

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Smaller homes make developers rich – but they are shrinking our lives | Wayne Hemingway https://t.co/SAHHMrVTH1 Solicitors & Estate Agents In One Just £899 + vat .. https://t.co/GmjoJxU3bM

Smaller homes make developers rich – but they are shrinking our lives | Wayne Hemingway https://t.co/SAHHMrVTH1 Solicitors & Estate Agents In One Just £899 + vat .. https://t.co/GmjoJxU3bM (via Twitter http://twitter.com/conveyandmove/status/1034441605493784577)

Smaller homes make developers rich – but they are shrinking our lives | Wayne Hemingway

The average house has lost 20% of its space since the 1970s as austerity warps planning processes and greed rules the market

On any given week, if you can bear to look, you’ll see dispiriting news about the state of housing in Britain. Last week brought research suggesting that the average home in Britain has shrunk by 20% since the 1970s. Elsewhere, Persimmon, the UK’s second biggest housebuilder, announced half-year profits of £516m, up 13%, thanks in part to the government’s help-to-buy scheme (earlier this year, it emerged that the company’s CEO Jeff Fairburn had been handed a bonus of £75m).

Homes are getting smaller, and for the top few national housebuilders profits and bonuses get ever bigger. How did we get here? One answer is greed. Homes are crucial to our needs – elemental to how we live. It beggars belief that businesses are allowed to abuse this for such outright profiteering.

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The housing crisis will not be solved by curbing speculation alone | Anne Perkins https://t.co/nU1TpQhbB8 Solicitors & Estate Agents In One Just £899 + vat .. https://t.co/GmjoJxU3bM

The housing crisis will not be solved by curbing speculation alone | Anne Perkins https://t.co/nU1TpQhbB8 Solicitors & Estate Agents In One Just £899 + vat .. https://t.co/GmjoJxU3bM (via Twitter http://twitter.com/conveyandmove/status/1034396660099686411)

The housing crisis will not be solved by curbing speculation alone | Anne Perkins

The IPPR’s call to freeze land prices is right – but it will take more than a tweak of land supply mechanics to fix the mess

The increase in the value of land that has, or just might get, consent for housing verges on the incredible. This is not any old increase in value. It’s way beyond the increase in the value of your one-bedroom flat, even back in the day when it earned more in a week than you did. No, farmland with planning permission goes up at least a hundredfold, and in chosen parts of southern England – Oxfordshire, say, or Hampshire – the value of the land might go from £12,000 an acre to £2m or more, once it’s been signed off by the planners.

The Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) thinktank has been worrying about housing more and for a longer period than almost any other thinktank. So its recommendations carry weight. Today it’s calling for new powers for local authorities to designate land for development and then freeze the price, in an attempt to eliminate the windfall gains landowners make when they get planning permission to build houses on an acre of two of their plot. But reformers should beware. They think they will get more land more cheaply so that new houses cost less. It’s been tried before and it didn’t work then, and it would take a highly controversial increase in local authority powers to have a chance of working now.

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