Chez newts

The dragon hung motionless above the surface of the earth, belly picked out in the colours of fire and a stegosaurus zigzag along his back. A beautiful thing, this dragon, but not easily seen: you must go out at dusk in spring with a torch and a knowledge of the places they lurk. Here was just such a spot. It was his season of grand passion, and yet the expression on the face was remote, almost indifferent.

A great crested newt. Floating in a pond. It is the dread of every developer: to pay decent money for a mandatory ecological survey and to have the surveyor find a population of them right in the middle of your working area, meaning compensation, relocation and, in some cases, cancellation.

It’s easy to mock this process. Newts are almost as rich a source of comedy as mothers-in-law. Everybody likes frogs, toads are thrillingly sinister, with their witchy associations. But newts are ridiculous and obstructive.

Ken Livingstone spent a political lifetime being mocked for being a newt fancier. P.G. Wodehouse never tired of the fact that Gussie Fink-Nottle — the one who, being ‘a glutton for punishment’, stared at himself in the mirror — kept newts. The newt-keeping was almost as absurd as his taste for orange juice and Madeline Bassett.

The shield carried by the armies of Political Correctness Gone Mad surely bear the image of a newt rampant. Now there are serious steps on hand to cut down their nuisance value to developers. They come from the government’s own conservation organisation Natural England, which is not, it’s fair to say, a hotbed of radicalism. Natural England has announced, tautologically, that it is to ‘implement an innovative new approach to the conservation of great crested newts across the country’.