Deer oh deer, MORE porkies from the posh Pinocchio
Rewilding toff Ben Goldsmith was rumbled last month for lying about the deer that devastated his neighbours’ land. Now read how he bullied a female farmer with false threats of jail and ask: How CAN he stay at Defra?
endless battles in court. So I believe he thinks that by making these sorts of threat, he can scare us off and buy our property.’
Goldsmith insists otherwise. When I telephoned this week, he said he was angry about the death of the deer, was ‘taking legal advice’ and would simply ‘like to see the law tested on this’.
A couple of hours later he changed his tune, however, saying he had decided to drop the case.
‘We’ve probably got the guy who pulled the trigger bang to rights but not the woman who ordered him to do it,’ he alleged. ‘So we’re not doing anything.’
Goldsmith has further insisted he does not wish to purchase his neighbour’s property. However, Ms Horstmann then showed me three WhatsApp messages he had sent her this year in which he specifically offered to buy or lease a hefty portion of it. On May 7, he asked her: ‘ Would you consider selling those acres, if the price was right?’ And on June 4, he once more inquired: ‘For the right price, would you be interested in selling those fields?’
‘ He lies and then lies again,’ adds Ms Horstmann. ‘He doesn’t care. Everything that man says is “BS”. I just don’t believe a word.’
Goldsmith has certainly told an extraordinary number of porkies in recent months, for a man who (at the moment) holds public office. In April, for example, he told local farmers — as well as the council — that he had purchased just 22 red deer at the start of lockdown, claiming they escaped by accident.
However, a WhatsApp message sent to a neighbour the day after the deers’ arrival tells a different story. It stated that 32, rather than 22, had been set free on his land as part of a planned effort to introduce a population of the animals.
‘Red deer back in south Somerset after a very long absence,’ Goldsmith gleefully told the neighbour. ‘20 pregnant hinds, 12 mixed-sex yearlings, and two stags coming end of the month ... it’s a collaboration with the owners of the big woods on the ridge, the [Duke of] Somerset estate, and Longleat.’
When I put the contents of that message to Goldsmith last month, he told me that when he wrote it, ‘I must have been lying to my neighbour’.
Elsewhere, he claimed several times in April and May to have hired professionals who had rounded up nearly all the deer. ‘Good news: one vanload [of deer] rounded up and off back to where they came from,’ read one message. Council minutes record that he told officials in June that just six deer remained at large. But in fact, as Goldsmith later admitted, he was making it all up: not one of the several dozen creatures he had imported had been removed, except for the four Ms Horstmann’s stalker had shot. Since then, local landowners are understood to have culled more than 20 deer, as well as between 40 and 50 wild boar. Several of the boar were castrated males, suggesting they were illegally purchased from a farm.
Perhaps Goldsmith’s most bizarre communication, in the context of his subsequent threats to Ms Horstmann, is a text message he sent to her tenant Nick Hutton on June 24, in which he claimed to be trying to remove the deer.
‘I’ve managed to find a professional marksman who will come through Cannwood and surrounding properties during the next few nights to look for red deer and wild boar,’ it read. ‘I’m covering the cost of it.’ In other words, Goldsmith seemed to be stating — in writing — that he hired someone to kill red deer out of season. That is, of course, the very thing for which he has since threatened to take someone else to court. But when I asked about pots and kettles, he insisted that, despite his claim to be ‘covering the cost’ of the marksman’s visit, ‘I don’t employ him, nor have I ever paid him.
‘I told him to only give me intelligence on red deer, where they are, how many and so on. I absolutely would not have allowed him to shoot any ... perhaps my message to Nick should have been clearer.’ Perhaps it should. Or maybe Defra board member Ben Goldsmith’s words would be taken more seriously if he didn’t tell quite so many lies.