May ‘ready to ditch vote on fox-hunting’

AROUND 250 hunts will gather for traditional Boxing Day meets today – as Theresa May prepares to scrap a vote on repealing the hunting ban.

The U-turn comes after recent opinion polls showed more than two-thirds of Britons want the ban to remain in place.

Mrs May – who confirmed her support for foxhunting earlier this year – is expected to announce early next year that she will drop the commitment to a Commons free vote.

Insiders have suggested that she believes the policy conflicts with her attempt to rebrand the Tories as the ‘caring’ party.

A source told the Sunday Times that Mrs May ‘ will make it clear ... this is no longer a Conservative Party policy’, while another told the Daily Telegraph that the Prime Minister ‘wants to find a way to ditch it’.

But Tim Bonner, of the Countryside Alliance, which opposes the hunt ban, suggested a U-turn could be disastrous for the Tories.

He said: ‘Conservative membership has already gone through the floor, so now it has only about 130,000 members. We have 100,000 .... There is a lot of overlap between their supporters and ours – who would not be happy.’

Boxing Day is the busiest date in the hunting calendar, and around 250,000 people are expected to meet at hunts across the country today.