Peter Oborne

They went to ground

Peter Oborne exposes the interested parties who failed to march on Sunday

ONE of the most remarkable things about Sunday’s magnificent Countryside March was the superhuman effort shown by many people to get to London. This does not merely apply to the folk from Scotland and the north of England who rose hideously early in the morning to make long, boring coach journeys south. Not just to the disabled marchers who braved physical pain, the 97-year-old woman who insisted that she would get round if it was the last thing she did, or the pregnant woman who completed the march, though due to give birth the following day.

People came from the ends of the earth. Rounding Eastcheap in the City of London, I encountered the formidable lady president of the American Master of Fox Hounds Association. A little later, walking at a snail’s pace down Lower Thames Street, we were cheered by a crowd of French hunters over for the day. Irish farmers flocked across the Irish Sea on a scale normally encountered only at the annual Cheltenham Festival of National Hunt racing. One family from Saudi Arabia flew in to London for the march, then straight back to the desert. The list of these marvellous, dedicated people is endless.

But there were villains as well: those from Britain who could not be bothered to do their bit. Men like Martin Pipe, Britain’s champion National Hunt trainer; a sport that may well come under ugly threat the moment that hunting is banned. Pipe says that his leg is in plaster, but a broken leg did not prevent the outstanding National Hunt jockey Richard Johnson from marching. The villains include organisations like the Council for the Protection of Rural England, which shamefully failed to pull its weight, and Tory MPs who went AWOL.

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