Revealing hunting's heart

Sir Roger Scruton's passion for following hounds profoundly influenced his writings on rural matters and the connection between people and the land

- Written by Colin Brazier

IT WAS at Labour's annual party conference a quarter of a century ago that the mask slipped. With an election looming, Tony Blair was again pledging to ban foxhunting. The Prime Minister, wary of needlessly offending rural voters, was judicious in the words he chose. But his deputy, the late John Prescott, was less careful: "Every time I see the Countryside Alliance's contorted faces I redouble my determination to abolish foxhunting," he said. After the ban, which Blair came to regret, Prescott rarely squandered an opportunity to caricature those who hunt as stupid and vicious. They were variously, he wrote, 'ruddy-faced toffee-nosed twits' and 'brainless toffs'.

Prescott's prejudice was commonplace. To hunt was, according to urban myth, not just cruel but an act of vaulting stupidity. City folk found it incomprehensible that anyone should enjoy hunting, so its practitioners must therefore be uncomprehending. Those who did were devil-may-care dunces drawn from the same cloth as the fictional John Jorrocks, whose inability to string a grammatical sentence together was immortalised in his most famous mangled maxim: 'The 'oss loves the 'ound, and I loves both.

Beauty and simplicity

But, just as not every Labour MP backed the ban, so very few hunting people fit the stereotype. One backbencher, the then Labour MP for Vauxhall Kate Hoey, even went on to become chair of the Countryside Alliance. She was greatly influenced by the writings of Sir Roger Scruton, who later in life rode to hounds: an epiphany that formed the basis of his book On Hunting. Baroness Hoey, as she is now, admits that Scruton's book amounted to a revelation: “It resonated with me as I thought he captured the beauty and simplicity of country life, which is so difficult to explain to those not brought up there.” Hoey bought half a dozen copies of