The hunting of the snark: Farage's Boxing Day hunt

The former Brexit Party leader visited a traditional Boxing Day hunt in his home county of Kent, but what does hunting with dogs mean in contemporary Britain?

Scrolling through my Twitter timeline earlier, I saw Nigel Farage’s grinning countenance, wearing sunglasses against the winter glare. He was at a hunt, and pointed at the camera with that unique combination of crude charm and boorish menace which marks him out in British politics. “Traditional Boxing Day, you should all be here!” he hectored, or invited, or warned. Horses were milling around behind him—can horses mill?—and Farage was wearing the sort of clothing that townies reach for when they want to emulate our country cousins, a waxed cotton coat over a tweed jacket, and a flat cap. A little bit of research revealed that he had been at Chiddingstone Castle in Kent, where the Old Surrey Burstow and West Kent Hunt had gathered before the Boxing Day hunt.

The hunt he was visiting is an amalgamation of three packs of hounds, the Old Surrey, the Burstow and the West Kent, rather like a much-merged regiment of the Army, still trying to hold on to all the traditions and distinctions of each ancestor. They have been doing this a long time, with the West Kent Hunt dating back to 1776, but have now come as far into the modern age as to have an Instagram account. According to their website, they engage in trail hunting, a legal practice in which a trail of animal urine is laid in advance of the hunt and the members follow it with hounds and horses as they would a live fox. In a section on “Compliance with the Hunting Act 2004”, the hunt specifies that:

We use trail layers on quad bikes, on foot and on horseback. Our team is able to simulate the finding of a fox in a covert, the fox leaving covert and a run across country that has previously been opened by the Master of the day.

So let us put that to bed to begin with. This was a legal activity with a long tradition, no laws were—so far as we know—being broken and it is the right of Farage as much as any one of us to hang around with horsemen and horsewomen on a cold but bright 26 December. The practice of trail hunting is not completely without controversy, as the hounds sometimes pick up the scent of live animals while following the artificial trail, but it is within the law and an accepted alternative to now-illegal practices.

Oddly, perhaps, I have no strong feelings about hunting. I am very firmly a townie, and I generally find the countryside useful mainly for keeping different conurbations apart, though I have a great fondness for tweed of all kinds. I have never seen a hunt, never encountered one, and I know very few people who have hunted (though I do count one or two real enthusiasts among my friends). The fierceness of the New Labour project to ban hunting was alien to me, but so was the determination of those who defended it almost like a religion. In practical terms, the survival or otherwise of hunting with dogs affected me not at all, and in ideological terms, well, in the late 1990s I had a lot of other intellectual and emotional battles to fight.

I don’t like animal cruelty—who does?—but I also understand the limits of my knowledge and understanding. I have often reflected that I could only form an opinion on hunting with dogs if I could answer with a fair degree of certainty two questions: firstly, does the fox population need to be controlled; second, if so, how efficient and humane compared to other practical means is hunting with packs of dogs? Only then could I really creep towards an informed view, but it is a reflection of how little it affects me that I have never sought out the answers with any real determination.

Of course, hunting was symbolic long before it was banned by the Labour government. It is associated with the rural upper classes, and the image of red-coated horsemen dashing across fields—the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable, as Wilde has Lord Illingworth describe it in A Woman of No Importance—is an iconic representation of traditional English country life, a pastime encapsulating the established order of society. (I say “English”; there are hunts in all four jurisdictions of the UK, 34 in Wales, 10 in Scotland, and six in Northern Ireland, where hunting is still legal, but it seems a particularly distinctive part of English rural life, and there are 142 active hunts in England, dwarfing the other jurisdictions.)

The indications are that the ban on hunting enjoys general public support, though it is of course sharply divided according to geography. Sir Tony Blair, who introduced the ban, has said that it is the piece of domestic legislation which he regrets most, and he confessed in his memoirs that he ensured the Hunting Act 2004 had enough loopholes to allow a degree of activity to continue, and encouraged Home Office ministers to steer the police away from strict enforcement of the ban. He admits that he knew little about hunting when he agreed to the promise to ban it, and it is perhaps characteristic of the man that he was surprised and almost offended by the vehemence of its supporters, especially when around 400,000 people marched through London in September 2002 at a protest organised by the Countryside Alliance. With more than a whiff of unappetising self-pity, Blair wrote in his memoirs:

If I’d proposed solving the pension problem by compulsory euthanasia for every fifth pensioner I’d have got less trouble. By the end of it, I felt like the damn fox.

Nevertheless, while the pro-hunting lobby was passionate, the generally anti-hunting public seem to have welcomed the legislation. In 2002, the year of the Countryside Alliance march, 57 per cent of those surveyed by YouGov agreed with the statement “hunting with dogs is never acceptable”. Three years later, support for the ban had fallen to 47 per cent, but only 26 per cent opposed it. By 2009, Ipsos MORI found that support for the ban had risen substantially to 75 per cent. This seems reasonably logical; a majority was instinctively against fox-hunting, doubts were sown in some minds by the intricate process of introducing the necessary legislation, but by the time it had bedded down and been in force for five years, most people were happy with the new status quo.

Polling conducted last month by YouGov seem to give a very clear signal. 79 per cent of those surveyed believed hunting with dogs should remain illegal, a mere 10 per cent wanted to see the ban reverse, and 11 per cent did not know. Those are numbers which you would have thought would appeal to an old master like Sir Tony Blair. The Conservative Party manifesto in December 2019 said of the issue only “We will make no changes to the Hunting Act”, representing a realisation that there was no future nor any extra support to be had from championing hunting’s restoration. At the previous election in 2017, Theresa May had inexplicably (to me) overruled colleagues to insist on including in the manifesto a commitment to offer MPs a vote on the issue.

It seems safe to say, then, that the Hunting Act will remain on the statute book, and that the ban on hunting will remain in force, but will also remain patchy and poorly enforced. This might almost be a characteristically British compromise to please the largest group of people, leaving only fanatics on either side exercised about it, and that, I think, would reflect quite well on the flexibility and nuance of our institutions and the way they operate.

So why is Farage making a point of attending a hunt on Boxing Day 2022? He is hardly the Jorrocks de nos jours. He was born in suburban Kent, his father a stockbroker in the City, and he went to public school in London before deciding, rather than to go to university, that he would become a commodities trader at the London Metal Exchange. His interests are known to be relatively straightforward: beer, wine and nursery food, cigarettes, and baiting Europeans. All of these are traditional English pursuits but none seems to tie him deeply to the land, and indeed he has German and French Huguenot ancestry. But he is not a fool, and those who allow distaste for his views or style to lead them to underestimate him are making a mistake. His recent biographer, the veteran Michael Crick, regards Farage as “the most significant politician of the century so far”, and looking at the UK’s exit from the European Union and the Boris Johnson-driven populist nationalism which grips a wing of the Conservative Party, one can see what Crick means.

Farage is currently “resting”, to use the argot of the stage. Earlier this year, he launched a range of three Cornish-distilled gins, and in March he launched the Vote Power Not Poverty campaign to oppose the UK’s net-zero 2050 targets; he was an early recruit to the one-club populist opinion channel GB News and is president of Reform UK, the party he founded from the foundations of the Brexit Party. But he has the air of a restless man, one in search of the next cause, the next bandwagon to join or windmill to tilt at. But Farage understands that he is his own most successful and attractive product. Brand Farage has taken a long time to build, but it has a clear image and had achieved considerable success.

Hunting is surely part of that image creation. Farage knows that the numbers who will see him at a hunt and react to him with new warmth on that basis is small; but that is not his aim. Partly, of course, he wants that small but conservative section of predominantly rural society to look to him rather than Rishi Sunak’s Tories as their spiritual representatives. More importantly, I suspect, he grasps that by associating himself with hunting, he reinforces his image as slightly old-fashioned, traditionally minded but a little cussed and unwilling to bend to fashionable progressive mores. He wants to burnish the shine of his authenticity, his remarkable ability to reach beyond ordinary party lines and establish a personal connection with some voters. His is the politician for people who don’t like politicians or politics.

Is there life in the old dog yet? He talked of retiring from active politics after Brexit, having achieved the greatest ambition of his life, but Farage is a trouper, and he loves the limelight and the stink of the groundlings. A television show or a gin business will not satisfy him. So he has done a simple thing: gone along to a small village in Kent on Boxing Day to meet some probably agreeable people and in all likelihood enjoy a glass of port in the crisp morning air. It has cost him nothing, and posting an extremely short clip on Twitter (where he has 1.7 million followers) will have put a big enough cat among enough pigeons to count as a good day’s work.

Some Conservatives are wary of Farage on manoeuvres, thinking back to the stunning if fleeting success of the Brexit Party in the middle of 2019. I am not, on balance, one of them, though I don’t underestimate his connection to a deep part of the English psyche. He is looking for a purpose, of that I am sure, but I don’t think he has found it yet. But one thing should be a clear lesson from the past 20 years of British politics: never count out Nigel Farage. Watch this space.