Tanya Gold Tanya Gold

The Wild Rabbit’s food may be organic – but nothing else there is

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The Wild Rabbit is a pub in the Cotswolds, that small corner of Britain full of evil grinning cottages; if the Cotswolds were a small dog it would always be mounting interior decorators and ripping out their throats. It is owned by Carole, Lady Bamford, the wife of the JCB billionaire Sir Anthony ‘Digger’ Bamford, which of course poses the question — does she have a toy one at home? And when she proved she could look after that one she got a real one?

In any case, the Wild Rabbit is a story because Lady Bamford is also the owner of Daylesford Organic, which obviously helps stock the kitchens at the Wild Rabbit; when the Daily Mail — which has an ambivalent relationship with organic food, because it is posh but hippies eat it, and hippies are disgusting — discovered the existence of the Wild Rabbit, they dispatched an investigative journalist (OK, it was Jan Moir) to investigate; she probed, as we all do, the meat, and then the class system. This is the poshest pub in Britain, Moir pronounced, because she does not understand the class system. The posh either own the pub outright, or shop at Tesco and eat at home, with dead animals hanging off them like hats, or both. It opened in the previously blameless village of Kingham last month.

The Wild Rabbit used to be called the Tollgate — but who wants to think about taxes, even old, Thomas Hardy–esque ones, while they eat? The building is huge, pale, square; it is a monumental dolls’ house — is Lady Bamford Nora? Outside there are chairs too neat to sit on, and well-behaved topiary, which I think has been terrorised into obedience by Lady Bamford or her agents.

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