INVESTIGATES

AT eXACTLY 4.21pm last Sunday, as she pottered around the kitchen, a horse breeder called Beth horstmann heard her mobile telephone ping. It was Ben Goldsmith, the owner of a stunning Queen Anne mansion surrounded by 250 rolling acres of forest and flower meadow in a picturesque corner of south Somerset known as Witham Vale.

A scion of the famous dynasty — his brother Zac is a prominent Tory peer, sister Jemima is a film producer — Ben, 39, is one of Beth’s closest neighbours. The northeastern edge of his estate borders many of her fields.

But the reason why Goldsmith was getting in touch that day, via the messaging service WhatsApp, was the opposite of neighbourly.

The financier, whose father was the late tycoon James, wanted to inform 62-year-old horstmann that he was launching a bid to take her to court and then, he hoped, see her sent to prison.

he declared that he had ‘decided to look into bringing a private prosecution against you’ under animal welfare laws.

If this was successful, Goldsmith said, it could leave either Beth or her husband Colin facing up to a year behind bars. ‘My word, it’ll be funny if I manage to get you convicted of wildlife crime,’ he gloated. ‘I’m going to do my best!’

The message, passed to me this week, marks a new development in a dispute that has gripped this once-idyllic community, sparking angry confrontations both online and in the fields, as well as a police investigation.

The hostilities date back to April and pit Goldsmith, a board member of the Depart-ment for environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), against some of the very farmers and other rural inhabitants the government department regulates.

They revolve around the powerful Tory donor’s obsession with ‘rewilding’, a modish form of land management in which tracts of countryside are taken out of agricultural production and allowed to return to nature. As part of such schemes, large grazing mammals may be introduced to the landscape to help ensure that varied habitats develop.

Goldsmith appears to have decided recently to ‘rewild’ his Cannwood estate, which he bought in 2009 via a Cayman Islands company for £3.8 million. So after removing livestock from much of the property, at the start of lockdown he released a herd of between 20 and 50 red deer.

There was only one problem: for reasons best known to himself, he failed beforehand to build a fence that would prevent the animals escaping. In fact, he instructed staff to remove most of the fencing on his estate.

Inevitably, large numbers of the red deer — big creatures which typically inhabit remote parts of exmoor and the Scottish highlands — promptly upped sticks from Goldsmith’s land and began colonising the surrounding area, where they destroyed crops, tucked into valuable grazing and caused serious damage to farm property belonging to neighbours.

At about the same time, a large number of wild boar appeared suddenly in the area.

Many suspect Goldsmith is respon-sible for the boar, too, not least because he recently wrote a message to a neighbour recalling an incident when ‘some of my wild boar got loose and try as I might I was unable to retrieve them’.

however, he now denies ever having introduced the dangerous animals — a crime that carries a prison sentence of up to two years — and says he typed the words ‘wild boar’ in error when he really meant to type ‘pigs’ because ‘I must have been typing on my phone while driving’.

Under questioning, he has, however, admitted feeding wild boar on his property, a breach of guidelines designed to prevent the spread of disease. Avon & Somerset police are investigating.

Whatever really went on, Gold-smith has also confessed to telling a series of extraordinary lies about the release of deer, which besides damaging crops could also spread TB to cattle in a high-risk area for the devastating disease.

Over the course of several weeks, he falsely claimed in writing both to local farmers and to the parish council that the creatures had escaped by accident and he was in the process of rounding them up. In fact, they had been deliberately set free and he was making no effort to control them.

When the Mail obtained evidence of his serial dishonesty, Goldsmith finally admitted that almost every-thing he’d told the local farming community was untrue: ‘I admit that what I wrote in those messages was a lie. I was bulls******g and I am deeply sorry.’

Despite this confession, he has for some reason been allowed to remain on the board of Defra, to which he was originally appointed by Michael Gove and from where he now reports to environment Secretary George eustice — meaning he continues to help set the nation’s farming policy.

Meanwhile, his brother Zac is himself a junior Defra minister, as well as a close friend and confidant of the Prime Minister’s fiancée Carrie Symonds.

This month’s legal development concerning Ben Goldsmith dates back to the middle of May.

By that time, Beth horstmann claims to have been at her wits’ end: for six weeks, she had been waking up to find herds of deer in her garden ( munching flowers) and her paddocks ( chewing their way through the grass that was supposed to feed her Arabian horses through the autumn).

By then, a 50-acre field on her property that was being cultivated for silage was home to about 20 of the deer Goldsmith had released.

They had eaten some of the silage crop and trampled mud into large areas of the rest of it, meaning it could no longer be properly cultivated. This would leave her tenant dairy farmer, Nick hutton, facing difficulty when it came to feeding his herd during the winter.

Correctly deciding that her wealthy neighbour had no intention of compensating her for the damage (already estimated at £2,000) or removing the deer from her land, she hired a stalker to do the job instead.

On the morning of Sunday, May 17, he shot four of the animals, two of them pregnant hinds. The rest ran off.

It was this incident to which, several months later, Goldsmith referred when he sent the recent WhatsApp message threatening to take Ms horstmann to court.

Her crime, he claimed, was having the red deer killed outside the season when they are usually allowed to be legally shot.

‘hello Colin and Beth,’ it reads. ‘Just a heads up. I’ve decided to look into bringing a private prosecution against you for the unlawful killing of those poor, harmless, beautiful red deer out of season ... several witnesses are willing to testify and the police who were involved at the time have confirmed they will co-operate.

‘Up to three months in jail for each animal I’m afraid. In a country of wildlife lovers, I think it’s a good idea to test the robustness of english wildlife law. I’ve approached Wild Justice [an animal rights group co-founded by Chris Packham] and the RSPCA for guidance. I’ve got the key lawyer coming down from Bristol in a few days’ time. I’m sure he’d be delighted to swing by if you’d see him.’

All of which sounds like quite a threat. But there are some awkward facts to consider.

First, despite what Goldsmith claimed, Avon and Somerset Police have not ‘ confirmed they will co-operate’ with his prosecution. A spokesman tells me: ‘If Mr Gold-smith is pursuing a private prosecu-tion, that is of course a civil matter so we wouldn’t have any involvement in the case.’

Secondly, the RSPCA are not on board either. ‘This is not something we are aware of and we are not investigating,’ they say.

Neither is Wild Justice. ‘Ben Gold-smith did contact us but we weren’t interested, though we did give him contact details for a few specialist lawyers,’ a spokesman tells me.

Thirdly and perhaps most importantly, there is no evidence whatever that Ms horstmann committed any crime.

In fact, english wildlife law specifi-cally allows landowners and their employees to kill a red deer at any time of year, provided they have ‘reasonable grounds to believe’ it is causing damage to crops. And horstmann’s grazing and silage field was, of course, crops.

‘There is, in my view, virtually no prospect of success in a private prosecution here,’ is the verdict of solicitor Tim Russ, co-author of the legal manual Law Of Field Sports.

‘You have a clear defence and I would expect any such prosecution to be stopped before it reached court by the Attorney General, who can block such cases if he believes them not to be in the public interest, or thinks the people behind them may be motivated by a personal agenda to intimidate the defendant.

‘There is a high chance that both could apply in this case.’

On this front, Ms horstmann believes Goldsmith’s legal threats are designed to make her life uncomfortable because he wishes to purchase her land. ‘ he’s a Defra board member. how can he not know silage is a crop?’ she says. ‘Of course he must.

‘But he’s a wealthy man who can afford very expensive lawyers and we don’t have the sort of cash to fight