A marriage of convenience

Whilst it is still too early for intelligent people to fully digest the Con Lib coalition, it is, in some ways, a miserable circumstance for David Cameron of having to marry someone because the church has been booked. Whilst we are pleased for his confetti, there are some fairly glum faces amongst the ushers.

There exists in all of us some elements of Liberal sympathy. I think not of Clegg and Cable but of better times and the oratory of Jo Grimmond and Jeremy Thorpe. When it was Thorpe's turn to coalide, he showed that, with Harold Wislon, he was not prepared to jump into bed with just anyone. Later events showed that it was just with Norman Scott.

TV's Charles Moore

It was Private Eye, some years ago, who nicknamed former Spectator and both Telegraph's editor Charles Moore as 'TV's Charles Moore. This was, one supposes, a reference to his occasional (and, if I recollect, somewhat stilted) appearances on political programmes.
There is, then, some comic irony that yesterday, in Hastings Magistrates' Court, Moore should have been found guilty of refusing to pay his television license and was fined £262 with £545 costs. His argument, not accepted at law, was that presenters Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand were in breach of the BBCs charter by making lewd remarks on radio about actor Andrew Sachs (Manuel in 'Fawly Towers') and Sachs's granddaughter with whom Brand had occasionally slept.

The Hounds of Hell

When Francis Thompson wrote his dramatic, Christian and pro-hunting poem, 'The Hounds of Heaven', little would he have contemplated the state of hunting today. It exists in an environment of legal and moral uncertainty, yet is resolutely pursued, in belief or actuality, by more than 400,000 people in Britain today.

This morning, before news which I predicted here two days ago that the Lib Dems would shamelessly throw in their lot with discredited Labour came to pass, I was telephoned by Horse & Hound for whom I have been a hunting correspondent for the past twenty years. "What," I was asked, "Is the likelihood of hunting reform in the forthcoming political climate?"

Gravely Voice

Six miles from Exeter where we farm the soil is deep red and, until now, the atmosphere has been one of hard earned rural tranquility. The old railway still runs by the river Creedy and the local pub brews its own beer.

All that may soon change if a letter that I received by hand this morning, an otherwise tranquil Sunday, is to be believed. The Church Commissioners who own a 260 acre farm by the pub and railway are planning to turn it into an open cast gravel mine which will rumble seven days a week for the next twenty years. Twenty lorries a day will leave the site.

Next week (19th May, 7.30pm, Newton St Cyres Village Hall) there will be a public meeting to discuss the plans, and I shall be there. I shall also make sure that our newly elected MP Melvin Stride and the Bishop of Exeter know about the plans. I shall also be in touch with the chairman of Devon Country Council as they are being asked to include the plans in their mineral planning policy.

Post Election Blues

Even by the half-hearted and, frankly, often myopic corner of my part of Devon, there is a feeling of deflation following the election results. Where there was once a glimmer of hope that the Conservatives might produce a clear mandate for fiscal reform, decency and yes a steady hand on hunting, we are now faced with a second General Election, and humiliating, unworthy, backroom deals.

This will lead, straightforwardly, to an increasing distrust in the electoral political process. We have quickly sickened of the false family units and promises of each of the three main party leaders. None of us doubt that David Cameron did his best, but he was neither Conservative enough nor clear enough. We all work hard, and through the night. We are just not followed by film crews when we do it.

Mad Bad and Dangerous

Rory Knight Bruce's column in this month's Field magazine

Single issue for foxhunters

As we stand on what is hopefully a new dawn for politics, and following that a measured understanding about the future of hunting, many of my generation are feeling that this is their last chance to ‘do something.’ I was reminded of this when recently I was invited to dinner in the House of Commons by a lifelong friend and MP.The thing about the Commons, away from the shrill clarions of David Dimbleby’s ‘Question Time’ and its back-bending ‘impartiality’ (the monstrousness of which afterwards always gives me a sleepless night) is that it is really rather a fair and reasonable place. Opponents treat each other, much as I treat antis on the hunting field, with the feeling that at least they believe in something.

Mad Bad and Dangerous

From the Field, March, 2010

Royal Flush

It is not every night I stay in a grand hotel bedroom which announces previous occupants have been the Prince of Wales and the last executed murderer Ruth Ellis, though not at the same time. Such was my billet in Newquay for a dinner and talk to the Cornish branch of the Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust.

I know their first choice of speaker-a rugby player or ‘celebrity’ country person who does not actually take part in the sport they rattle on about-had jacked. But I was not going to let this or the seven courses (this year’s favourite at dinners seems to be inedible guinea fowl) put me off. Trying to get a Cornishman to laugh, however, unless it is about a shipwreck or Emmets having their cottages advertently burned down, requires full oratorical skills. Game conservators, their speciality here is snipe and woodcock in Cornwall, are rather shy souls, like the better sort of beagler.