Still a game cook

Norman Tebbit talks to Patrick Galbraith about fieldsports, politics and the joys of cooking game

Ifirst read Norman Tebbit’s The Game Cook at 5.30am, lying beneath my duvet eating jelly babies. It was Christmas Day 2009, and I had found the little book poking out of my stocking at the end of my bed. At that point I had no idea who Tebbit was. Eight years on, as inevitably happens to any good cookery book, my copy is now torn in places, tatty throughout, and covered in gravy stains.

Some months ago, the controversial former Tory grandee decided to republish the great little cooking companion, so I thought I’d give him a ring and see where his love for all things shooting began. When he picks up the phone he is standing over the stove, midway through making partridge and dhal. This, Tebbit tells me, is his party piece and the dish he would pull out if he was a young guy trying to impress some girl.

Youth for Tebbit was quite some time ago; aged 86, he now finds “tramping over ploughed fields, holding a gun and a large bag of cartridges, increasingly difficult”.

Until this point I had only ever heard Tebbit speak in videos filmed some 30 years ago. A voice that once launched withering attacks across the Chamber in that distinctive accent now sounds unsettlingly frail. He “can no longer remember” much about his first day’s shooting, he reveals, but it was “at a place called Toddington just off the M1”, an estate belonging to a friend where he “had some jolly good fun over the years”.

It is interesting that a man who wasn’t from a shooting background decided to take it up during his time in Parliament, when most politicians nowadays seem keen to distance themselves from fieldsports in the public arena. Would he have felt able to take up the sport were it 30 years later and he was on the trajectory to becoming a minister?

“It shouldn’t be detrimental to a political career at all,” he says. “As I explained quite forcefully to a young man collecting money for the RSPB in my local town yesterday, shooting and conservation go hand in hand.”

“Not much of a Tory”

I suggest that while David Cameron certainly knew that, he didn’t appear to go shooting once during his time in office. “He probably didn’t,” Tebbit sighs, and then adds that he never thought “Mr Cameron was much of a Tory anyway”.

The recipes in The Game Cook were inspired by conversations the peer has had in his local butcher’s shop. By the sounds of things it is something of a regular haunt.

“When I was last in I saw a few rabbits hanging there — a fiver a piece and you don’t need to spend another fiver to make a good meal

34 • SHOOTING TIMES & COUNTRY MAGAZINE out of that. Now you try going to a fast-food restaurant with a tenner and see what you get.”

At this point he seems to have rediscovered a bit of that bulldog spirit: “You’d get next to nothing and it would be utter rubbish.”

I ask him if he has been keeping up with Sir Ian Botham’s initiative to redistribute surplus game to those affected by food poverty. “Of course,” he replies. “I thought it was a very genuine initiative. The debacle seems so typical of the ‘anti brigade’.”

Tebbit adds that he believes

Sir Ian’s treatment is indicative of entrenched attitudes at the BBC.

I can feel exactly where the conversation’s going. “They’ve got that Countryfile programme,” he says. “It’s just a sort of long, boring, hand-waving harangue against country sports.” I’ve devoted far too much time to discussing Countryfile recently so I change the subject: as the man once seen as Margaret Thatcher’s attack dog, what sort of dog would he like to be now?

“Oh, that’s easy,” he replies. “I would like to be a yellow Labrador with a good master who frequently takes him shooting.”

The Game Cook