John Walsh: 'The stately homes of England need cash. Stand by for a class cataclysm'

The stately homes of England are a law unto themselves, what with their dinner gongs, their pollarded elms, and their druggily bewildered offspring. So it's no surprise to hear that their owners are in trouble, not from anything relating to mortgages or credit crunches (which, frankly, don't play a huge part in their lives), but from the weather. The wretched summer has seen visitor numbers at Poopwell Court and Howler Hall fall by a nasty 15 per cent. New income is vital. What to do? A funfair in the grounds? Hot-air ballooning in the meadow?

Don't be absurd. You do what Sir Richard Fitzherbert is planning to do, and clutch the cagoule-wearing lesser orders to your bosom. He is one of a roster of stately homeowners who plan to let visitors inside their sacred portals. From next year, for a modest £2,000 for four days, you'll be allowed inside the red ropes, free to sleep in the Pink Room, where the ghost of the unfortunate Lady Honoria Pyke nightly perambulates, and you'll be able to dine with Sir Richard and experience at first hand what it's like to be a 21st-century aristocrat. "You won't get gifts on the pillows as you do in some of those hotels," he told the papers. "There are enough country hotels. This is more of a personal experience."

I'll say. My occasional forays inside the stately-home world have been characterised by many things, but comfort and relaxation haven't figured high. It wasn't just the clanking geyser over the ancestral bath, or the slobbering Newfoundland, or the drunken footman brought in to entertain the company with his bugle-playing skills. No, it was the intense social awkwardness that kept hosts and guests on their toes – the latter through fear of perpetrating a terrible mistake by spooning three quenelles of turbot on to their plate instead of two, or of pronouncing "Gloucestershire" to rhyme with "beer" rather than "duh"; and the hosts, through the strain of trying to anticipate a gaffe and swat it before anyone noticed. So stand by for a class cataclysm.

Sir Richard, meanwhile, is preparing for the fray. He looks to the scheme's organisers, Old Etonians Mark Chichester-Clark and Charles Hurt, for guidance. "I'm not as well-read as Mark and Charles," he says, "but I hope I can hold my own over dinner. I've done it before with 25 American wives. They all wore sneakers and drank chablis." How charmingly old-fashioned that he should worry most about not having read the same books as the strangers in his house, rather than that they might appropriate the family silver.

* I have nothing but sympathy for Martin Rynja of Gibson Square, the publisher of The Jewel of Medina, and its author, Sherry Jones. Because it's a novel about the relationship between the prophet Mohamed and his child bride Aisha, Mr Rynja's house has apparently been firebombed and Ms Jones is in some personal danger.

Some might say they could have seen it coming, as Islamic leaders protested about it in Serbia earlier this year. The author tried in vain to mollify and reassure. "To claim that Muslims will answer my book with violence is pure nonsense," she said. "Anyone who reads the book will see that it honours the prophet and his favourite wife."

Have we learnt nothing from the Rushdie affair, 20 years ago? First, Islamists are suspicious about Western works of fiction, seeing them as culturally sanctioned lies. Second, they are unlikely to read contentious books in order to debate their virtues. Third, works of fiction about Mohamed are seen as telling lies about the Prophet. Fourth, they will still invoke the doctrine that insulting the Prophet is a heinous crime.

Did you hear the guy on Radio 4's Today, saying: "If someone insults your father, will you not retaliate? And if someone insults your God, who means 10 times more to you, will you not retaliate more?" I heard this specious argument two decades ago about The Satanic Verses. It doesn't matter how respectful and cautious Ms Jones tried to be; when the word "insult" can be stretched to mean practically anything, some extremists, like Cardinal Richelieu, will find enough in five lines of handwriting to hang someone. We need enlightened London Muslims, not the author or publisher, to argue them out of making history repeat itself.

Interesting? Click here to explore further