LAST week’s Chief Pleas sitting was an historic one – the last scheduled meeting of an assembly in which the landowning tenants have sat for almost 450 years.

Sadly, there wasn’t an ‘end of school’ atmosphere about it, the sitting having barely got under way when the Seneschal, Reg Guille, issued a reminder about speeches being privileged, a parliamentary way of saying that people can’t be sued for what is said.

I was not alone in wondering what was coming and it wasn’t long before our curiosity was satisfied when, apropos of nothing on the agenda, one member stood to impugn the integrity of another.

It is more than 35 years since I first reported on the proceedings of a legislature and Sark’s Chief Pleas is the fourth such assembly I have been privileged to attend. What was said on Wednesday morning by Edric Baker about his fellow tenant, John Donnelly, was as close as anything I have ever witnessed to being an abuse of the parliamentary privilege to which I referred earlier.

It was totally indefensible and should not have been permitted.

That was how the sitting started and it ended with a scathing attack by the Seneschal and Seigneur Michael Beaumont on the Barclay family who, in addition to Duncan Barclay, were represented at the sitting by two lawyers, advocates Gordon Dawes and Jennifer McDermott, and two employees, Kevin Delaney and Mark Harrisson.

A frequent comment I hear from Sark residents – not all of whom are employees of the Barclay family, I stress – is that they find it difficult to argue with some of what is said in the Brecqhou publication, Sark News. It is a sentiment I sometimes share.

That said, there appeared to be relatively few at the Chief Pleas sitting (including me) who shared Advocate McDermott’s apparent incredulity at the comments from the top table. Indeed, she was either genuinely shocked, both at the comments and the reaction to her assertion that the Barclay family ‘are only trying to help’ – and she really should not have been – or she was giving a performance which, in another sphere of activity, would have earned her at least an Oscar nomination, if not the statuette itself.

There is much to praise about what our neighbours from Brecqhou have achieved in the past year or so and, as was said elsewhere earlier last week, even their fiercest critics would find it difficult not to applaud the transformation of The Avenue.

But this is being done against the backcloth of repeated suggestions that if certain things either happen or do not happen in the political arena – depending on the issue at the time – then the family’s investment (considerable and welcome as it is to the island’s economy) will halt.

Barclay family employees Richard Knight (left) and stonemason Terry Regan working on the rebuilding – stone by stone, as it was demolished – of Sark’s historic Beauregard Cottage. (0653060)

Earlier this week I had a walk to the Barclays’ site at the former Beauregard Hotel, where work has already started on the rebuilding of the historic cottage which formed part of the premises. The plan is to involve the island’s schoolchildren in the renovation project – a move that no one in their right mind could possibly fault, although I daresay some will try.

But how long will it be, someone asked me the other day, before this piece of economic activity becomes yet another football in the political arena?

Surely it’s not too much to hope that the new Chief Pleas can start in January with a clean slate and no leftover baggage.

• The email address for comment is fallesark@sark.net.