Politics

Dear Peta, Thank you for your recent letter objecting to my campaign to support British livestock farming and encouraging sustainable red meat industry. I read with interest your argument that consuming red meat is ‘out of touch’ and ‘irresponsible’. I am sure the millions of ordinary Britons who have enjoyed roast beef or a shepherd’s pie will be surprised to learn that they are ‘out of touch’ and with good reason. The House of Commons recently organised a ‘World Vegan Month’ for restaurants on the estate to promote veganism. There is a World Vegan Month, World Vegan Day and National Vegetarian Week but nothing to promote responsible, sustainable produced red

Trouble is brewing in Parliament. First there was vegan month, which rattled the cages of the establishment’s red-blooded males, and now a proposal for a meat month has led to beef between a Tory MP and Peta. The animal rights group have asked Neil Parish, who is chair of the All-Parliamentary Group on Animal Welfare, to reconsider his proposal for the carnivorous celebration, claiming the idea is ‘grossly irresponsible’. Not put off by the hostile reception, Parish is pushing on with his plans for a ‘Red Meat Month,’ arguing it’s only fair Parliament’s restaurants celebrate British meat in the same way they have embraced the green stuff of late. In an open letter sent to Steerpike, Parish has responded to

Labour, the Lib Dems and Ukip are having quite a bit of fun with their identical letters from their respective leaders demanding that David Cameron take part in the TV debates – or risk having something done to him that is even worse than a noun being turned into a verb (the latest threat is that he will be ‘empty-podiumed’, which sounds considerably more unpleasant than being ‘empty-chaired’ and possibly as bad as someone ‘weaponising’ something). As for why David Cameron doesn’t want the debates to go ahead, Daniel Finkelstein has a revealing piece in today’s Times in which he says the Tories forgot about Nick Clegg when they signed up

‘Ukip seems to have imploded,’ one ‘mainstream’ politician remarked to me yesterday. ‘We haven’t heard anything from them.’ True, Ukip have been rather quiet since Christmas, but anyone in the Tories or Labour who is dancing around imagining that they’re set fair for an election without Nigel Farage has got rather carried away. The truth is that Farage’s party has decided to stay a little quiet for a few weeks, at least while the main parties slug it out over who would really cut the deficit and who really cares about the NHS. Sources tell me that they think the effect of all these launches, counter-launches, dossiers and dossiers debunking

One of the obsessions that will only get worse over the next few months – along with checking every poll that comes out every day to see whether you’re six points up, four points behind, or level-pegging – is what ‘red lines’ the parties will set out for their Coalition negotiations. David Cameron has made his EU referendum one, and it turns out that this isn’t as much of a problem for the Lib Dems as all their huffing and puffing on the subject would have you believe. Nick Clegg has been setting more red lines because he is the leader of the party that wants to talk about coalitions,

Flick Drummond’s campaign to win a Conservative seat in Portsmouth South has hit a bump in the road. Word reaches Mr S that plans for a set of campaign posters for Flick had to be revised after the Conservatives realised that from a distance the poster could be misread as  -well, another word starting in F. The issue appears to be with one particular set of Conservative election posters which has the candidate’s name all in upper case and white font. When you put Flick Drummond’s name in this format, as Mr S did in the mock-ups shown, there is a rather unfortunate effect if viewed from a distance… ‘It’s bloody embarrassing but also bloody