The countryside really hates Dave (I got it from the horse’s mouth)

I’M ON my own on Exmoor. I can’t watch TV as there are three remote controls and none of them seem to work. There’s no mobile reception in the valley. It’s raining. It’s blissful. Then I found out that midweek it was the 121st Exford Horse Show, organised by the Devon and Somerset Staghounds and the Exmoor Pony Society – ie the goldplated red-letter day in the West Country calendar.

This was, I realised, a gala opportunity not just to see folk and buy crumbly, clotted-cream fudge, but to find out the mood of the shires as we trot towards an Election.

On Wednesday, therefore, I drove to a windswept hill near the top of our farm, and parked amid the mud-splattered Subarus, as the tannoy blared out over the moor.

If I hurried I could enter Coco for Prettiest Bitch in the dog show, but we middle-aged females have to be realistic when it comes to gathering ye rosettes (my crossbreed peaked when she bagged second prize for Waggiest Tail at Winsford village fete in 2002).

So we tore through the food and craft tent, past the antler competition – I couldn’t stop, I was hungry and in a hurry to find my hostess, Ann (Baroness) Mallalieu, President of the Countryside Alliance, who was going to give it to me straight from the horse’s mouth, I suspected.

‘Cameron’s sacked the one person, Owen Paterson, who was really spot on, on everything,’ said my hostess, as I tucked into the scrumptious smorgasbord off the back of her ringside Land Rover, while Mrs Barlow loped past on Grey Topper in the Novice Hunter Mare or Gelding class.

‘He’s sacked the man who took on the department that subscribed to the views of the last Labour government – a regime that thought there were no votes in the countryside, and thought that rural policies should be dictated by town – the man who persisted with the badger cull, and who got TWO standing ovations at the Game Fair at Blenheim.’

Then the chairman of the Quantock Staghounds, local solicitor Nigel Muers-Raby, chipped in. ‘Cameron’s lost his way, he’s turned his back on who he is. He used us in the last Election to stuff envelopes and deliver leaflets [more than 12,000 hunt supporters campaigned for the Tories in the last Election] and he’s taking us for granted for 2015.

‘Lord knows,’ he continued, as four mares did a lumbering synchronised dance to the

AS I watched my niece and nephew making cinnamon buns and heard them chatter about upcoming ‘biscuit week’, I wished that I’d insisted Mary Berry, the star of Bake Off, was one of the Woman’s Hour ten game changers in 2014. I honestly think that if everyone was forced to watch GBBO (do we need to spell it out?) it would bring world peace, as everyone downed weapons, laid aside medieval religious hatreds and baked swiss rolls instead. Harry Potter theme tune, ‘what Cameron will face unless he delivers the goods.’

And so it went on. At every stand, from the man selling carved walking sticks made from horn to the beer tent, this was the lie of the land.

The countryside is furious that Paterson – its great white hope for a return to real hunting – has been whacked, just as O-Patz had been rumoured to be on manoeuvres to achieve this goal via a cunning statutory instrument that would have amended the Hunting Act to allow up to 40 hounds to flush out foxes to waiting guns on Welsh hill farms.

It is furious that ‘dotty old ladies’ don’t leave their millions to the Countryside Alliance but to animal-rightist lobby groups such as the RSPCA, which have slick PR operations across Westminster, and bottomless pits of funds to prosecute hunts willy-nilly.

In fact, the countryside is so furious that 13 per cent of CA members are declaring they’ll vote Ukip, as they are not convinced Cameron remains a Shire Tory and they fear his instinctive feeling for the countryside has been lost in coalition.

But underlying all this fury, here’s the political calculus that makes the squires from the shires really foam at the mouth with impotent rage.

The countryside knows it’s not going to get its beloved hunting back, or shooting protected, under Labour.

And it knows in its bones what the Tory Party strategists know – that a vote for Ukip, however much Nigel Farage gladhands masters of foxhounds and necks his stirrup cup – is a vote for Ed Miliband of Dartmouth Park, North London.

So it’s all gone a bit Millwall, basically. As I found on Court Hill, Exford, at this point in the cycle, the countryside hates Cameron, and Cameron doesn’t care.