Hunting

Sunday

Rex Fisher

Britain’s hunts are a rural lifeline in the fight against coronavirus

Puppy shows cancelled. Point-to-points put on hold. Hound shows, team chases, skittles leagues, pony club camp – all have been axed from the countryside calendar. These are not announcements that tend to make headlines. What’s the cancellation of the Cattistock Countryside show when Glastonbury is grinding to a halt? Not that it’s a competition, but it’s a fact that rural areas get overlooked in times like these. In response, countryside folk are taking matters into their own hands. In my own village in Dorset – a village not big enough to qualify for a postbox – Sylvia, an ex-schoolteacher, has decided it’s essential we have a community pop-up shop for emergency rations. At 66,

Wednesday

Charles Moore

The mysteries of the Corbyn world-view

It is worth fixing for posterity the feelings which, on polling day, swirled in the breasts of many who wanted a Boris victory. Being a journalist, I normally enjoy the electoral scene with some detachment. I cannot claim to be neutral, since I have never, even in Tony Blair’s pinkish dawn of 1997, wanted a Labour government; but I can take it in my stride. This time, however, millions, including myself, were knotted with fear that anything other than a clear Tory victory would destroy Brexit and make Jeremy Corbyn prime minister. The risks were actually frightening. We sought distractions. Listening to the Radio 4 Today programme that morning, I

Thursday

Charles Moore

Labour thinks that its trump card is Trump

On Wednesday morning, I was hoisted into the air of Whitehall on a cherry-picker. A century ago the proto-Cenotaph appeared in time for the London Peace Parade in July 1919, which followed the signing of the Treaty of Versailles. In that first year, the Cenotaph was only a timber and canvas structure, built to last a week; but Edwin Lutyens’s design seemed so right that the present structure, more precisely designed, was built in Portland stone for Remembrance Day 1920. English Heritage, now a charity rather than a government body, cares for the monument — as it does for 400 monuments in England, including 46 in London. The chairman, Vice-Admiral

Thursday

Bruce Anderson

Big two-hearted river

The Rhône is a strong river. The Loire derives graciousness from its châteaux. The Rhine and the Thames have been sentimentalised: not the Rhône. There are no Rhône-maidens, no suggestion of ‘sweet Rhône run softly till I end my song’. A powerful onrush of water rips past the banks of a river that knows how to drown men. But it also brings fertility in abundance. This is probably the oldest wine-growing region in France. The romantic version is that Greeks brought the Shiraz grape from Persia; 2,500 years later, Syrah is still the region’s vinous bedrock. As one would expect from a combination of the River God and the Sun

Thursday

Mark Mason

Beagles

Harvey’s finest moment, he would tell you, was the chicken kiev. I’d just made the garlic butter and inserted it into the chicken breast when the phone rang. The call went on for a while, after which I returned. No chicken breast. ‘Must have put it in the fridge,’ I thought, and began to look. Only then did I glance across at the dog. His expression said: ‘You’re going to work it out in a moment, aren’t you?’ It’s the beagle’s defining characteristic: a yearning to become the widest animal known to man. ‘Taking candy from a child’ isn’t just a phrase for a beagle, it’s a way of life.

Thursday

Charles Moore

The Spectator’s notes | 26 October 2017

Theresa May’s style of negotiating with the European Union is coming spookily to resemble David Cameron’s. She is in the mindset where the important thing is to get a deal, rather than working out what sort of a deal is worth getting. The EU understands this, and therefore delays, making Cameron/May more desperate to settle, even on bad terms. Eventually, there is an inadequate deal which the British government then has to sell to a doubting electorate. Mr Cameron was punished for this at the referendum he had called. Mrs May is inviting punishment at a general election. It is interesting how moderate politics cannot get a hearing just now.

Thursday

Jane Ridley

Bad behaviour

Molly Keane achieved fame and critical acclaim in 1981 aged 75, when she published the novel Good Behaviour, a razor-sharp social comedy about the Anglo-Irish in the 1930s. Her success was the more sensational because it was unexpected. Twenty years previously her play Dazzling Prospect had flopped disastrously at the box office. A drawing-room farce in the era of the kitchen sink, it seemed so dated that Kenneth Tynan remarked that he could hear horses whinnying in the audience. Convinced that her writing career was finished, Keane had published nothing since. She wrote Good Behaviour in secret, for herself. When her friend the publisher Billy Collins turned it down as

Thursday

Hari Kunzru

The trapper and the trapped

The Hungarian novelist László Krasznahorkai has only lately become known to Anglophone audiences, through the masterly translations of George Szirtes and Ottilie Mulzet. Work written and published in the 1980s, during the corrupt and cynical last days of so-called ‘goulash communism’ under János Kádár, began to circulate in English in the early 2000s. In Sátántangó, War and War and The Melancholy of Resistance, readers were introduced to nightmarish, purgatorial worlds shot through with millennarian anxiety and a hopeless mystical yearning for the divine. Then, in 2013, the massive novel — or perhaps more accurately a cloud of novellas — Seiobo There Below (published in Hungarian in 2008) revealed a writer

Melissa Kite

How did you kill that hat?

The well-dressed lady turned the fur collar over in her hands and fixed me with a withering stare. ‘Is this real fur?’ I was helping out in my friend’s clothes shop, a fashionable haunt in a chichi area of south-west London. ‘Yes,’ I said, bracing myself. She stroked the luxuriant fur, then asked, ‘What is it?’ ‘Fox?’ I said, making the answer a question, as you do when you are expecting protest. ‘Where did the fox come from?’ This was too much. I hadn’t the foggiest. So I fixed her with a meaningful gaze and said: ‘Northcote Road. It was going through the bins.’ She didn’t laugh. Was she going

Thursday

Bruce Anderson

Sherry to start

Someone came up with a century-old quotation plangent with irony and sadness: ‘The year 1916 was cursed: 1917 will surely be better.’ That was Tsar Nicholas II. Poor fellow: tragedy for him and his family, tragedy down the decades for tens of millions of his subjects. Its spectre is still haunting Russia. Although we raised a toast to the tsar’s memory, tragedy was far from our minds as we welcomed the latest New Year in a mood best described as eupeptic pessimism. Not hard to do: Dorset is one of the least dyspeptic places on earth. My friends who live there sometimes try to discourage me from praising their sweet

Monday

Jim Barrington

The truth about the fox hunting ban

During my years at the League Against Cruel Sports, the one single message we impressed upon people at every opportunity was that a ban on hunting with dogs was popular, simple and inexpensive. And animals, of course, would be saved from a cruel death. This belief was encouraged by a Tony Benn quote, which refers to everyone suddenly being on the winning side after any social change: ‘The change happens and you can’t find anyone that doesn’t claim to have been fighting for it with you.’ It was echoed shortly after I had left the LACS (having become disillusioned with the campaign and doubtful that any genuine animal welfare benefit would

Thursday

James Delingpole

Don’t try to be liked, and buy your steak at Aldi – the lessons I’ve learned in 2016

Merry Christmas everyone. Here are some things I learned — or relearned — in 2016.   1. That which does not kill you makes you still alive. It’s weird to think that less than 12 months ago I was in hospital, dosed up with morphine, battered and bruised with a broken clavicle, numerous cracked ribs and a pulmonary embolism which can actually kill you, don’t you know. And now it’s as if the whole thing never happened. Well, apart from the hideous titanium plate, like a giant centipede, which I can still feel all stiff across my collar bone. And the bastard hunting ban my family has imposed on me…

Thursday

Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 1 December 2016

It seems perplexing that François Fillon, now the Republican candidate for the French presidency, should be a declared admirer of Margaret Thatcher. Although she certainly has her fans in France, it is an absolutely standard political line — even on the right — that her ‘Anglo-Saxon’ economic liberalism is un-French. Yet M. Fillon, dismissed by Nicholas Sarkozy, whose prime minister he was, as no more than ‘my collaborator’, has invoked her and won through, while Sarko is gone. In this time of populism, M. Fillon has moved the opposite way to other politicians. He says his failures under Sarkozy taught him that France needs the Iron Lady economic reforms which it

Bruce Anderson

Bottle shots

This is something to be said for starting to celebrate Christmas before the end of the grouse season. It provides a good excuse for opening the odd bottle. Apropos bottles, the club of that name has not featured on this page for some time. That is not because of idleness. One Bottle is single-handedly defending the criminal justice system. Others are editing and writing for Reaction, an online journal which, though not (quite) as right-wing as it sounds, is waging the culture wars. There may be further members, but if so, they were elected late in the evening, and no one can remember who they were. But it is pleasing

Thursday

Camilla Swift

Field studies | 8 September 2016

Think back to any time you spent outside at school, and you’re most likely to recall a muddy sports field. At my school, one of the few times we were let loose into the surrounding countryside was when we took our Duke of Edinburgh’s award. Apart from that, the vast majority of our time was spent inside at our desks. Is that a good thing? The official curriculum might not factor in the great outdoors, but many schools have come to realise the benefits — both long-term and short-term — that being outside brings to their students. Traditionally, private schools have led the way in teaching youngsters about the ways

Thursday

Matt Ridley

Don’t grouse about grouse

The vast Bubye Valley Conservancy in southern Zimbabwe is slightly larger than County Durham, as well as much hotter and drier. Yet both contain abundant wildlife thanks almost entirely to the hunting of game. In Bubye Valley, it’s lions and buffalo that are the targets; in the Durham dales, it’s grouse. But the effect is the same — a spectacular boost to other wildlife, privately funded. Bubye Valley was a cattle ranch, owned by Unilever, until 1994 when it was turned over to wildlife. A double electric fence was put round the entire 850,000-acre reserve. Gradually the buffalo, giraffe, wildebeest, zebra and antelope numbers grew. Elephants and rhinos were moved

Thursday

Allan Massie

Clumber spaniels

For the first time in more than 30 years we have no Clumber spaniel. We have had five: Henry, Judith, Laurie, Persephone and Wattie. The last of them, Wattie the gentlest and sweetest of dogs, died a few months ago. We feel bereft. Clumbers are special: beautiful, affectionate, wilful, sometimes difficult, never dull. They take their name from Clumber Park in Nottinghamshire, once the seat of the Dukes of Newcastle. Different in appearance from other English spaniels — heavier, low-slung, with large sagacious heads — their origin is uncertain. According to one story, they came from France, being a gift from a French friend, the Duc de Noailles, to his

Thursday

Aidan Hartley

Wild life | 21 April 2016

   Laikipia I sip my Tusker beer on the veranda, staring at the elephant. He’s not the elephant in the room. He’s the elephant on what should be my croquet lawn. I thought he might go away, but he hasn’t. Instead he’s brought his friends — more and more of them as time goes by. They say the elephant will become extinct within a few years. Across Africa, poachers are decimating elephants — just not here, where they apparently feel safe enough to crap on my sward. Today, the fashionable argument promoted on Twitter, and followed by princes and prime ministers, is to burn all stockpiles of seized ivory in

Thursday

Alexander Chancellor

Long life | 17 March 2016

My time as a duck-keeper seems to have come bloodily to an end. I have had ducks on my pond for some years now, and I have kept buying new ones to replace those that have got murdered. This stretch of South Northamptonshire may look rather cosy and suburban, but it’s ruled by the law of the jungle. Not a day passes without some creature viciously killing another. Only a month or so ago there were 13 ducks on my pond. Then there were eight. Then there were five. And now there is only one, an Indian Runner drake that stands forlornly on the base of a statue in the

Thursday

Bruce Anderson

Game show

A few years ago, a distinguished cove in the diplomatic service was made High Commissioner to Australia. To prepare himself for the penal colony, he invited three predecessors to lunch, for advice. The first said that he should make contact with the Billabong institute in Sydney. They were experts on the transportees’ economy. The second advised him to befriend Ned Kelly, editor of the Convict Chronicle, who knew where the political bodies were buried, having often handled the shovel. Then it was Peter Carrington’s turn; Peter had held the post in the mid-1950s. ‘Watch out in late January,’ he warned. ‘When the shooting season ends, all your friends will try