In the fortnight before the General Election the national press was frantically searching the stone industry to find out about Ed Miliband's 'tablet of stone' – the Labour promises the party had written in stone. The Mail finally traced the stone to a warehouse owned by London Stone and conservation specialist PAYE.
The tablet containing Labour's promises was apparently made by stoneCIRCLE in Basingstoke and the Mail quotes one of the owners, Jeff Vanhinsbergh, as saying he is a 'true blue' Tory, just to add to Labour's misery.
Following the publication of the story, stoneCIRCLE's telephone was red hot with the rest of the national press trying to contact the company and it was not long before the phone was not being answered. Jeff and his brother Steve say they had to physically eject newspaper reporters from their premises in Basingstoke and Steve Vanhinsbergh got a few minutes of fame being interviewed on national television news.
StoneCIRCLE had signed a non-disclosure agreement with the Labour Party when they agreed to supply the stone but someone let the cat out of the bag and the press traced its manufacture to Basingstoke. After that it was just a question of time before the company that produced the tablet was discovered and Jeff admitted he voted Conservative.
The brothers still say they cannot confirm or deny that it was they who produced the tablet, which was a 3m high, 30mm thick slab of Moleanos limestone from Portugal. The pledges on it were sandblasted on to it and painted. Labour wanted it delivered upright, so a steel frame was specially made to support it.
As for the £30,000 the Mail says it estimates Labour paid for the stone… well, if it did, it certainly added insult to injury because it should have cost less than a quarter of that.
Steve Vanhinsberg says he does not believe the fuss about the stone and the national press attention has done stoneCIRCLE any harm or any good. "It's a topic for dinner parties," he told Natural Stone Specialist magazine.
You can read the Mail's report at bit.ly/Ed-Stone