It is time to fight for the future of racing

Fortunately for me and the politicians we entertained over my years covering the darkest profession, Mrs Oakley didn’t do a Sasha Swire and keep a gloriously indiscreet diary. Indeed her rule was that politicians who came to our house and talked only about themselves didn’t get invited a second time, a test that was frequently failed. The Swires’s guests, especially the Cameroons, seem to have talked about nothing else.

But Mrs Oakley can on occasion do the Swire sardonical. As our young flatcoat retriever, who longs to grow wings, disappeared over the horizon last weekend in pursuit of an indignant partridge, a one in three gradient loomed and I puffed that I wouldn’t be talking much for the next few minutes. ‘And that’s somehow something out of the norm?’ came the wifely rejoinder.

Mrs O.’s simpatico style ensures that we cannot pack our goods at Waitrose without checking on the cashier’s ailing mother. By contrast, she has been known to chide, my natural chat-rating puts me somewhere between a Trappist monk and an Easter Island monument — unless I’m on a racecourse. But that’s the thing: racecourses are sociable places. ‘How did you do in the last? What do you fancy for the next?’ Game girls of a certain age who have observed my friend the form guru and me poring over notes come up to seek a tip. Punters all around the paddock share smilingly in the exuberant celebrations of successful syndicate owners and in trainers’ explanations of their triumphs. ‘What is the plan now? That was the plan.’

Or so they all did. Nowadays racecourses are sad, empty, literally characterless places attended by only a sprinkling of closely involved professionals.