The thinking man’s trumpet

Britain’s pre-eminent conservative philosopher is rather muddy. I’ve seen him in London, tidy in yellow corduroy. In Wiltshire Roger Scruton is green and brown. Sundey Hill Farm, where he lives with his wife and their two young children, is a ‘rural consultancy’, a ‘meta-farm’ whose services include ‘log-cutting’ and ‘logic-chopping’. Scruton complains that he is too busy with the mental to do much manual labour, but this doesn’t stop him looking as though he’s been wrestling with a hedge.

As an undergraduate, in the shadow of his schoolteacher father, who detested the Conservatives, Roger Scruton was a ‘vague socialist’. Then, in 1968, he was in Paris, and what he witnessed there — as he describes it, the ‘antinomian emptiness’ of the student revolt — made him a conservative. He has written books on aesthetics, on music, on sexuality, on Kant, Spinoza and animal rights. But he made his name in 1979 with The Meaning of Conservatism, and his most successful books have all been on or around this theme. On Hunting (1998) stands as the most eloquent defence yet written of the threatened bloodsport; England: An Elegy (2001) is a sad celebration of the country which is gone, and The West and the Rest (2002) a powerful apology for Christian civilisation in general.

Inside, the farmhouse smells good, of cooked meat, varnished furniture and shabby carpets. Books are everywhere. In his study, Scruton scrabbles around, clearing up plastic toys and muttering imprecations on his children. We begin with fox-hunting.

If a ban is imposed, says Scruton, there should be a three-stage plan of action. First, ‘a mass act of civil disobedience’, in which everyone defiantly goes out ‘and blatantly hunts foxes’. Then ‘we do a bit of time in jail. Then we just carry on hunting in a different way. This Bill says it’s not a crime to use dogs to hunt rabbits.