What happens when Borsetshire tackles Brexit
Own up, fellow fans of
The Archers (Radio 4). Did you think there was the remotest chance that Lilian (née Archer, born 1947, merry widow of Ralph Bellamy) would turn down Justin Elliott, rich, powerful, older, married and Borsetshire’s biggest landowner, when he got around to asking her to share his wordly goods on a maritally fixed basis? Not I.
I thought she’d been manoeuvring him into it ever since he came to Ambridge. First she flirted, then became his social secretary, inching him every day thereafter closer to the downy billows of extramarital bliss. Even while, in Archerworld, Rob persecuted Helen before she stabbed him as the nation held its breath at the possible consequences, Lilian (played by Sunny Ormonde) and Justin (Simon Williams) carried on romping.
More recently, their amorous adventures narrowly escaped discovery with Lilian making a hasty back door exit, clad only in fur coat and wellies. No wonder he told her last week that she was the most exciting woman he had ever met. He also declared he would divorce his wife in order to make Lilian the new Mrs Elliott. But Lilian, it seems, prefers the chase to the capture. She doesn’t want the domesticity, she told her sister Jennifer on Friday, or becoming taken for granted. She probably also doesn’t want to become a go-between twist Jennifer’s husband Brian and Justin, his partner in big agro.
But what’s this? All of a sudden Ambridge is also throbbing with real-life farm biz. David and Ruth’s cows are keeling over with some plague or other. Lambs are dying in Ed Grundy’s arms. Even Alice (yes, Alice, feckless daughter of Brian and Jennifer) is suddenly talking about reducing herbicide and pesticide waste. And, oh dear, the new vet, the businesslike one who knows new ways to cure ailing beasts, has gone away to take care of her aged parents. Nobody, to the great relief of all, has so far blamed any of this on Brexit.
Meanwhile, Farming Today (Radio 4) has a different essay each day this week on the hopeful effects of Brexit on our rural economy. Germaine Greer (Monday), writer and academic, has a rural smallholding and waxed ecologically passionate about the need to preserve wildlife, water rights and let nature run a bit wilder. (On this, she is at one with The Archers’ Jennifer who has persuaded husband Brian to leave a corner of his newly acquired land for general wilding up.) What Greer would like is for Brexit to be the portal to all such initiatives.
Yesterday Tim Smit, founder of the Eden Project in Cornwall and recipient of much Euro-funding to accomplish it, is “petrified” by our existing general attitudes to farming and land use. Don’t we realise, he said, that the average age of UK farmers is just under 60? That we have allowed our agricultural and horticultural colleges to decline? That the Department of Environment, Farming and Agriculture is an “elephant’s graveyard” of civil servants? That our attitudes to genetic modification need a radical overhaul? That, generally speaking, we are in a state of agricultural decline comparable to ancient Rome, just before its empire fell? Brexit, he argued, could be the threshold to swift and radical changes of attitude to land ownership and stewarding.
Today Tim Martin, prominent Brexiteer and founder of the Wetherspoon group of pubs, was firmly optimistic. We will trade better under World Trade Organisation rules. Common sense will prevail over the sale of hormone-enhanced American beef. He is for immigration as long as we have a policy to control it.
The conviction of these interviews is undeniable, bracing, refreshing. Whether any of the speakers will affect policymaking remains to be seen. Yet, seeing how effectively in the past The Archers alerted us to the effects of everything from the varroa mite on bees to multiple diseases on livestock, we should also remember how, pre- and post-referendum, it has kept all its discussions of Brexit scrupulously balanced.
I look forward to hearing Princess Anne tomorrow discussing what she’d like to see in post-Brexit agricultural policy and, on Friday, food journalist and broadcaster Jay Rayner arguing for it to give us a new approach to food production. But, since fiction seems to stick longer in the mind than fact, I shall await the judgements of David, Ruth and Pip Archer, Adam Macy and his stepfather Brian Aldridge, plus all assorted Carters, Grundys and Snells before I dare to moan that the price of my favourite loaf has gone up by 45p since the nation voted for Brexit.