How saintly Mary Berry’s the victim of class warriors
My BLOOD absolutely boiled when I saw the story about a woman hunt member whipping a saboteur with her riding crop. She thrashed him 17 times before he let go of her horse’s bridle. Seventeen times! Good grief.
As far as I am concerned, double that number of lashes would not have been enough. Not nearly enough.
Jane Miller was filmed by Brighton Hunt Saboteurs on Saturday, when a protester grabbed her horse by the reins. ‘Get off my horse,’ she screamed at him. And when he wouldn’t let go, she let fly with the whip. What else was she supposed to do? The masked protester was not only harming her horse, he was in danger of causing the animal to bolt, rear or kick out with its hooves and throw its rider.
Someone could easily have been killed or maimed — most likely 56-yearold Mrs Miller herself.
However, hunt saboteurs do not understand this.
Blinkered
by their dubious cause, which purports to be to protect Mr Cuddly FoxyWoxy from the brutal horse ’n’ land-owning gentry, they have no understanding of country ways.
As far as they’re concerned, the only difference between a Firkin Fox and a Fursty Ferret is the alcohol content.
What is the correct action when 70st of increasingly skittish horseflesh is bearing down upon you?
If you try yanking its bridle, tearing its mouth and shouting at the top of your voice, then you deserve everything that comes your way, you utter idiot.
The police are now looking into the incident and, in the interests of fair play, can I offer them a clue?
The innocent party is rarely the one hiding their identity behind a balaclava or mask, doing their worst under a cloak of anonymity. And the horse was left with a bleeding and ‘ruined mouth’, so jot that down in your notebook, too.
Mrs Miller is a member of the east Sussex and romney Marsh hunt, who were taking part in the entirely legal sport of drag racing.
Instead of hunting actual foxes, the hounds follow an artificial scent trail which is dragged across the countryside. No animals are harmed, yet the saboteurs are not appeased.
When hunting with hounds was outlawed in 2004, you might have thought that the crusty sabs would have gone out of business, kaput, redundant.
They could go back to the comfort of their own firesides, spliff up, pop a cider, collect their welfare benefits and plot new ways to kick- start the revolution.
But no, here they are, faces hidden behind three layers of wool and as selfrighteous as ever.
At the weekend, they were trespassing on private land, convinced that Mrs Miller’s Hunt is secretly still chasing foxes, although they can offer up no evidence to support this claim.
For its part, the Countryside Alliance says hunts are still plagued by ‘balaclava- clad animal activists who intimidate’. Which proves what many suspected all along. Sabotaging hunts has nothing to do with animal welfare and everything to do with class warfare. Which, in these Corbyntastic times, is depressingly on the rise.
even the saintly Mary Berry got it in the neck this week for daring to present a TV programme which shows the landed gentry in an affectionate light.
In the new BBC series Country House Secrets, she was at Highclere Castle, the stately pile where Downton Abbey is filmed. It was a charming programme, where she cooked dinner for the earl of Carnarvon and his wife. Toot tootle toot! Call on the hounds. Corbynistas on Twitter were appalled. ‘I do not pay my licence fee for Mary Berry to espouse snobbery,’ fumed one, ignoring the fact that gardening expert Alan Titchmarsh was also there, which I would suggest rules out any pretence to posh.
ANOTHER
viewer got herself into a right state over the ‘cannon of lamb’ Mary was cooking. ‘ How do you suppose we viewers could ever afford to buy cannon of lamb? I’d never even seen it before!’
She probably has — it’s sold in Tesco under its everyday name . . . fillet.
My favourite was a woman who complained that Mary Berry was ‘rubbing people’s nose in what it is like to have money . . . not really appropriate for this time in history.’
I know times are hard, but it is not exactly the Potato Famine, darling. And I realise people are fed up of austerity and cutbacks, but the way these folks go on, you’d think we were all matchstick girls and boys, scrabbling for a rind of fat tossed out the window of a speeding limousine. Tally ho-ho-ho? There will always be those who are better and worse off. If the sight of a horse chasing a non- existent fox or lovely Mary Berry rustling up raspberry tarts and wafting around in a sparkly evening dress can really cause so much jealousy and unrest, then we truly are in a bad way.