"The entity is called Turnpike," Lindsey said, in the wood-panelled meeting room in Lincoln’s Inn where she hands out the Long Brown Envelope of Home Truths. In happier times, this notional envelope has contained a warning to the other side that they are about to get soundly thrashed—but not today. Today, we were at the mercy of a seventeenth-century jurist named Hugo Grotius, who penned in the year 1625 a learned treatise on the notion of compulsory purchase, known more grandly to our American cousins as "eminent domain." This right of supreme lordship is vested in the monarch and is now inevitably devolved upon the Prime Minister and any acting in the place of that executive. By it, the state is empowered to use, abstract and even destroy the property of any individual or collective if this action is necessary for the greater public good. The party upon whom the power is exerted must in turn be compensated to a reasonable value of what is thus taken. Britain being by tradition a place, like Grotius’s beloved Holland, where the power of the state is used sparingly upon a proud and independent populace—if recently afflicted with governments ever more nosy, inflexible and prurient—it is rare that the prerogative is exercised in any but the most exigent circumstance. It has been used in wartime to secure land for coastal defences, and in peace to preserve ancient monuments from destruction at the hands of besuited barbarians. It has been invoked by special Act of Parliament for railways and roads. Until this year, it has never even been suggested that it might be used to acquire a computer game company, and still less that such acquisition might stretch to include the services under contract of its principal employees.