It’s the Glorious Twelfth tomorrow and participants are looking forward to an excellent day of shooting. The Countryside Alliance are expecting a bumper supply of grouse, thanks to excellent weather, with the birds doing their best to avoid the guns of the finest shooters in England. One of those who’ll presumably be joining the fray is Sir Nicholas Soames, of whom surprisingly little has been heard since he stepped down from parliament in 2019.
His once overactive Twitter account is now largely confined to retweets and there’s sadly far less of his familiar face in the media than there once was. Now tipped for a peerage in Boris Johnson’s resignation honours list, the longtime grandee and former Spectator wine critic, does still make time for certain favoured media outlets. One of those is Field Sports, the journal of ‘Game shooting, fishing and hunting’ – solid stuff.
It’s guest edited this month by the Duke of Northumberland (net worth: £400 million) with Soames as his star interviewee. Now acting as an advisor to stockbrokers Panmure Gordon, the former MP is sanguine about standing down from parliament: ‘I fell out with my own party, they’d had enough of me and I’d certainly had enough of them.’ Still, the old battlelines do remain as the onetime defence minister named ‘illiberal government’ as the biggest threat to ‘our way life in the next decade’ adding ‘an incoming Labour government would be very unhelpful and ignorant over the matters that affect conservation.’
And Soames retains some political ties of old: asked about which of his six leaders was the ‘most in favour of fieldsports’, he replies ‘John Major and David Cameron’. The latter is praised as a ‘very skillful’ shot with whom Soames went grouse shooting last season. Cameron’s prowess with a shotgun was not shared by all of his predecessors however: Soames says that his late grandfather, Sir Winston Churchill, ‘wasn’t really a great shooter’. Instead, as an old man ‘he applauded anything to do with horses, he loved seeing us young children all hunting on shaggy, feral ponies.’
As for keeping busy, Soames claims to enjoy watching horse racing, international rugby and cricket on the telly: ‘I will have an early lunch then settle down for the afternoon, snacking on my neighbour’s delicious homsmade cheese biscuits and enjoying a small glass of port.’ Perfect preparation for the House of Lords!
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