LIES OF THE ‘REWILDING’ TOFF
I must have been lying to my neighbour [about releasing deer into the wild]. Maybe I was over-excited... it just got out of hand
So typical of metropolitan eco-zealots, this scion of the Goldsmith dynasty – a Defra board member – dreamed of bringing wild nature to his Somerset estate. Now he’s being investigated by police amid accusations he’s broken all the rules... after admitting he lied and lied again to furious local farmers
On Thursday morning, a police car crunched up the driveway of Ben Goldsmith’s country home, a Queen anne pile surrounded by flower meadows and lush woodland in a remote corner of somerset called Witham Vale.
Out stepped PC Pete Willis, the top wildlife officer at avon and somerset Police.
a veteran copper, he was recently promoted to lead a five-strong unit on the force’s rural Crime team, investigating offences that involve wild animals. The job, he once told a newspaper, allows him to really ‘get my boots dirty’. PC Willis’s mission, on this particular day, sounds reassuringly mucky.
he was investigating a bitter dispute between Goldsmith, the Old Etonian son of late tycoon sir James, and the owners of nearby farms and landholdings with whom he has spectacularly fallen out.
The hostile locals accuse him of recklessly introducing destructive animals to the area as part of an impromptu — and perhaps illegal — exercise in a trendy form of ecofriendly land management known as ‘re-wilding’.
specifically, they have established that in early april Goldsmith released a herd of between 20 and 40 red deer on his 250-acre Cannwood estate, which he purchased in 2009 via a Cayman Islands firm for £3.8 million.
The area where Goldsmith chose to set them free is not protected by 2m-high deer fencing — as strict defra guidelines stipulate — so the huge beasts promptly escaped onto land he does not own.
Ever since, the deer, which typically inhabit remote areas of the highlands and Exmoor, have been careering around lowland somerset destroying crops, tucking into valuable grazing and causing serious damage to farm property. Four were shot a few weeks ago, even though it was not the shooting season, in circumstances that have been reported to PC Willis.
There have also been sightings of large numbers of wild boar, which pose a threat to walkers and riders, close to Goldsmith’s land. hardly any were there last year. Treechomping beavers have made an appearance, too. Where these animals came from is among the issues PC Willis is investigating.
GOldsmITh has since admitted ‘stupidly’ releasing at least 22 red deer which he is now unable to locate — although there is some evidence there were far more. he denies having anything to do with the sudden proliferation in local wild boar numbers.
Perhaps more seriously, he has also confessed to telling local farmers — who are deeply concerned that the animals will spread TB to their cattle — a string of elaborate lies about the deer’s whereabouts.
In dozens of written messages obtained by the mail, which are now believed to be in the hands of police, he claimed during april, may and June to have hired professionals who’d rounded up almost all of the deer.
‘Good news: one van load [of deer] rounded up and off back to where they came from,’ he wrote on april 25 to Beth horstman, a horse breeder whose meadows were being grazed by Goldsmith’s deer, leaving her nothing to feed her animals in the winter.
‘Got more — six,’ he said later. ‘This last gang has been very elusive,’ he told her in early may. however, shortly afterwards he sent a photograph of a group, saying ‘these are the last six, being collected this afternoon’.
similar messages were sent to other local farmers. But there was a problem. Goldsmith was making everything up: he’d allowed the deer to remain in the area, and fabricated pictures to give locals the opposite impression. This week, he confessed that no deer had been removed by anyone he employs. he told me: ‘I admit that what I wrote in those messages was a lie. I was bullsh***ing, and I am deeply sorry.’
Pitchforks are duly being sharpened, not least because these and other falsehoods were being peddled by Goldsmith during discussions with landowners over the compensation he should pay for damage caused by his escaped animals, most of which have yellow ear tags, identifying them as his property. ‘There is,’ says one, ‘a very good argument that he’s attempted to commit commercial fraud.’
a few days ago I met no fewer than ten locals, in two separate meetings called to discuss their fury at the impact Goldsmith’s deer has had on their lives. It would be fair to describe them as furious.
‘If he wants to release these animals, he needs to keep them on his land. Then he can do as he pleases,’ said one, robert Gulliford. ‘But if he just recklessly lets a herd of red deer go, when it’s inevitable that they will escape, of course there’s absolute hell to pay. These animals are now causing havoc over a 20-mile radius.
dairy farmer nick hutton said the deer munched their way through a 48-acre field he was cultivating for silage, to feed his cows over winter. ‘What’s more, my biggest challenge in the past five years has been TB. There is a lot in this area and we are in and out of trouble with it.’
a TB infection in any herd can lead to the cows being slaughtered. yet as mr hutton pointed out: ‘This idiot has brought in a herd of animals known to spread TB, and allowed them to run all over. It’s dangerous and irresponsible.’
a third, mike stevens, said recently that the deer ‘have settled on our farm and are working their way through a field of barley’. Val Barton, a smallholder, has seen them eat not just most of her grass
(she’s now paying £80 a month to feed her horses hay) but also 90 small trees she planted.
Another beef farmer told me he’d lost a significant portion of a barley crop that was to have fed his animals during the winter. ‘They have also eaten a lot of my grass, which will have to be replaced with expensive feeds. I have reported it to the NFU, who said what he did was illegal as well as inconsiderate.’ And so on.
If this wasn’t awkward enough, Goldsmith also lied — or as he puts it ‘bullsh***ed’ — in discussions with Witham Friary Parish Council last month, telling it that, in the words of a formal notice circulated to all parishioners, ‘12 [of the deer] have been returned to their previous owner’.
In fact, he knew full well that every deer remained at large.
Goldsmith’s decision to tell these and other porkies not only to the farming community, but also to his local civic authority is particularly serious because of the position he holds in public life.
The younger brother of Tory politician Zac and film producer Jemima, he has in recent years become a high-profile environmentalist with a finger on the Government’s levers of power.
He owes this privilege to inherited wealth. In the early 2000s, he gave tens of thousands of pounds to the Green Party, before switching allegiance to David Cameron’s husky-hugging Conservatives.
Among other flourishes of his largesse, he donated a considerable sum to Michael Gove’s Surrey Heath constituency. Perhaps returning the favour, Mr Gove in 2018 offered Goldsmith a job as non-executive board member of Defra, the Government department that oversees rural policy. He remains there to this day. This means that while Goldsmith was helping to run Defra, he was also flouting its guidelines about releasing deer, and telling a series of outright lies to the rural community it is supposed to serve. It is, as they say, a very bad look. ‘He’s a Defra board member,’ railed Robert Gulliford. ‘How can he make rules for farmers when he lies to them? And when he doesn’t know or simply doesn’t care about following rules himself?’
It wasn’t as if Goldsmith was particularly popular in farming circles in any case.
He HAS fought endless disputes with the agricultural community on social media, where he is a leading advocate of ‘rewilding’, a modish form of stewardship in which land is allowed to return to its ‘natural’ state.
In proper re-wilding projects, large mammals such as deer, wild horses and boar, and some breeds of cattle are typically introduced in small numbers over a wide area to promote biodiversity. However, unlike Goldsmith’s deer, they tend to be properly fenced in.
Advocates rightly claim that rewilding has myriad benefits for rare plants, insects and birds, and can increase the health of soil and help prevent flooding.
Opponents argue that taking farmland out of production means we have to cultivate the remaining land more intensively, or import more food, neither of which is environmentally friendly.
Goldsmith has spoken often of re-wilding his estate and the surrounding area. Locals believe he decided to release deer because he wished unilaterally to commence a project his neighbours would have objected to.
This may explain the further rumours — currently being investigated by police — that in addition to the deer, Mr Goldsmith is behind the sudden arrival of a vast number of wild boar.
That claim — which, it should be stressed, he denies — is extremely serious because releasing wild boar is illegal. These creatures can be dangerous and highly destructive.
Photographs of boar have certainly been taken in multiple locations across Witham Vale in recent months, and signs have been erected warning the public not to approach them.
However, Goldsmith insists he has nothing to do with their appearance, and argues they have been in the area for decades.
He does admit to having encouraged the boar population to visit his land. ‘I’ve had a hopper in the woods, feeding them for observation purposes for three or four years,’ he told me. And he told another local: ‘I am to blame for feeding them and that’s why they have lost their fear of humans.’
Yet even this is problematic, since Mr Goldsmith farms freerange Tamworth pigs at Cannwood. Pigs are highly susceptible to infectious disease, meaning farmers are supposed to follow stringent biosecurity protocols.
These include preventing wild boar — which can spread swine fever viruses — from getting anywhere near their livestock. Indeed, Goldsmith appears to have encouraged them at a time when an outbreak of swine fever is sweeping europe.
Now, I gather, the National Farmers’ Union and National Pig Association are investigating complaints about Goldsmith’s conduct. ‘Clearly there is a big biosecurity risk here,’ is how the NFU’s local representative put it.
When I asked Goldsmith if a responsible Defra board member who farms pigs ought to be feeding wild boar, he insisted: ‘I fed them on a different area to where I keep the Tamworths,’ adding he had stopped the practice ‘and won’t do it again’.
He stressed: ‘In the ten years I
I admit that what I wrote in those messages [about removing deer] was a lie. I was bullsh***ing, and I am deeply sorry
I have no idea why I wrote the words ‘wild boar’ in that message [to a neighbour]. I must have accidentally written ‘wild boar’ instead of pig
have been here, I have never owned a wild boar or been responsible for the release or escape of any wild boar. I am categorically sure of that, because doing it deliberately would be illegal.’
Strangely, however, I was then passed a text message that Goldsmith sent to a neighbour on April 26. It read: ‘Do you remember about ten years ago some of my wild boar got loose and try as I might I was unable to retrieve them? We didn’t know each other then, but I know you were annoyed about it. I’m so sorry about that. Do you ever see them nowadays?’
When I asked Goldsmith to explain this, he said: ‘I have no idea why I wrote “wild boar” in that message. It was a mistake. Some pigs escaped around 2009, but they were Tamworths or Tamworth crosses. I must have been typing on my phone while driving or something and accidentally written “wild boar” instead of pig.’
We must take him at his word, though it does seem a careless mistake for a Defra non-executive director to make. It is also true that not every local landowner is baying for blood. Ian Meeker, who farms next door to Cannwood, tells me: ‘As far as I am concerned, the deer are quite nice to see. I’m not saying that what Ben Goldsmith has done is right or wrong, but I don’t have a problem with it.’
FRED Nicholls, a third generation farmer in Witham Vale, added: ‘You’ve got thousands of acres of woodland around here, and he’s introduced 20 deer. It’s nothing really. Ben Goldsmith is being blamed for a lot of things he hasn’t done, because of who he is and what he believes in.’
Goldsmith himself took a similar line, saying he had ‘a pretty good relationship with most of my neighbours’ and alleging ‘a couple of people, who have philosophical disagreements with me over my approach for farming, are using this one small mistake to attack me. It is totally out of proportion’.
He admitted that buying the 22 red deer on April 11 was an unfortunate mistake — and insisted all of their movements were correctly recorded.
‘I was naïve,’ he said. ‘What happened was a deer farmer from Exmoor called out of the blue and said he was delivering red deer to places in the area and had some extra. He offered a good price but said I had to make up my mind in a couple of hours. So like a fool I said yes. I didn’t have time to build a proper fence, and by the morning they had gone. I am so, so sorry. It’s a silly, stupid mistake.’
I put Mr Goldsmith’s version of events to Ben Horne, the farmer who sold him the deer. Mr Horne described it as ‘b***ocks’, adding: ‘You can draw your own conclusions about who contacted who, and how far in advance it was arranged.’
I then obtained a WhatsApp message Goldsmith sent to a neighbour on April 12, the day after the deer arrived. In it, he said the delivery was part of a pre-planned bid to introduce a population of red deer. He also wrote that 32, rather than 22, had been released.
‘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.’
An accompanying video, now in the hands of Avon and Somerset police, shows 13 hinds being released into woodland. Goldsmith appears to have filmed it himself.
When I put the contents of that message to Goldsmith, he said: ‘I must have been lying to my neighbour. It was an exciting thing to do at the beginning of lockdown and I am afraid it just got out of hand.’
PC Willis continues his investigations. The question now is how dirty this dispute will get.