The Spectator’s Notes | 3 January 2013

‘The rain is ever falling, drip, drip, drip, by day and night… The weather is so very bad, down in Lincolnshire, that the liveliest imagination can scarcely apprehend its ever being fine again.’ That is Dickens in the 1850s (Bleak House). It is a similar story here in Sussex as the year 2013 comes in. I usually have no objection to ‘bad’ weather, but the worst of this is that the land is so saturated that man, motorised vehicle and mounted beast is effectively banned from the fields, as if there were an outbreak of foot-and-mouth. So perhaps I am sitting and brooding too much; but it does seem to me that David Cameron is losing rural support at quite a rate and not realising. In this, the failure to repeal the hunting ban is significant. The Conservatives are, in fact, right, not to press for a vote now — because they failed to win the election, they do not have the numbers to carry repeal. But the situation exposes the problem. Pro-hunting people were the mainstay of Tory activism in a great many seats in the last election. It is calculated that 94 currently sitting Conservative MPs were substantially helped by the ‘Vote OK’ campaign that mobilised hunting people. Unless something happens, they will not get that support next time. A patronising and ignorant leader in the Times last week said that ‘the compromise arrived at seems to be working pretty well’. What compromise would that be? People whose livelihood depends on hunting suffer constant surveillance by ill-natured extremists. Men leading tough and often solitary lives on low wages are harassed by a well-funded charity, the RSPCA, which spends enormous sums on prosecutions, but cannot afford to keep thousands of the animals entrusted to its care and puts them down instead.