Matt Ridley

Diary – 4 May 2017

Also in Matt Ridley’s Diary: Want to embarrass a groom-to-be? Dress him like a Tory

The Prosperity UK conference over a week ago kicked off with a dinner at Hatfield House that brought together Leavers and Remainers in the spirit of making the best of what happens next. Lord Salisbury (L) couldn’t resist a crack about his ancestor doing to the Pope what Mrs May is doing to Mr Juncker — negotiating a new dispensation, shall we say. Lord Hill (R) mentioned that Martin Luther started the Reformation 500 years ago this year; for England, that all got muddled up with a royal divorce. The next day, Niall Ferguson (R turned L) compared Brexit to negotiating a divorce settlement with 27 ex-wives.

My godson came to lunch on his stag weekend after a night out in Newcastle. The done thing is to dress the groom in an embarrassing outfit, so he was kitted out in a Sunderland football shirt to ensure maximum abuse. At the greyhound track, a different stag party had gone one better: they had dressed the groom up as a Tory.

Otherwise, I spent the bank holiday weekend watching live sex and violence. That is to say, for two dawns and two dusks I was immersed in Britain’s greatest wildlife spectacle bar none: the ‘lek’ of the black grouse. Having set up two hides (blinds) the week before on a hillside in the north Pennines, my friends Reggie Heyworth and Tarquin Millington-Drake and I occupied them in twilight. The evening show was spectacular enough, with 40 large male birds strutting and swaggering all around us, their blue-black bodies set off with swollen vermillion eyebrows and bums like white chrysanthemums held erect between lyre-shaped, black tail feathers. All the while they emitted strange bubbling sounds interspersed with an unearthly sneeze-snort, which Tarquin, who took incomparable photos, likened to the opening of a fizzy can of lager.

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