J ust as no man is a hero to his valet,
no mother-in-law is a heroine to her son-in-law. Except mine, that is. Miloska Nott (bullet dodger, charity fundraiser, daffodil farmer) is a remarkable woman. In 1992 she started the Fund for Refugees in Slovenia of which I am now a trustee. In its typically confusing Balkan way, it now helps to rebuild the lives of the surviving Bosnian Muslims (Bosniaks) of Srebrenica, where Miloska has just built 25 houses, a school and a surgery. Wherever she goes, they hold up her picture and wave it as with an old-style communist leader. Let Bob Geldof strut his stuff over Africa, but I suspect that there are many like her, performing heroic acts in a quieter, more understated and expletive-free manner.
Ten years on they are still exhuming bodies from the mass graves around the haunted town of Srebrenica. The unprovoked genocide of the Bosniak population under the noses of the Dutch, the UN, Generals Janvier and Morillon and the then UN special envoy Akashi, and the failure of Europe and, alas, the then British government to act, are some of the most shaming political episodes since the second world war. The memorial cemetery at Srebrenica in the shadow of one of the disused factories where Bosniaks were butchered should act as a constant reminder. It is fitting that Bill Clinton opened this. Without America’s intervention that terrible conflict would have dragged on interminably. God Bless America!
It seems to me that one of the main problems with the Dayton agreement is that it did not incorporate any ‘sunset clauses’. Clearly there can be no long-term solution to Bosnia Herzegovina while that artificial construct the Republika Srpska continues. Equally, there can be no progress while Croatia and particularly Serbia continue to intimidate and interfere. Both these countries want to be part of the EU. There should be no discussion of such a possibility until they admit to their war crimes and leave Bosnia Herzegovina alone. Similarly, until the mass murderer Milosevic is sentenced, and other genocidal lunatics like General Ratko Mladic and Radovan Karadzic — still at large — are brought to The Hague, the message will not sink in and the Bosniaks will remain justifiably cynical.
To matters closer to home. At 46 I have ruled myself out of the current Conservative leadership race on the grounds of age. I can now devote what years remain to me to my pigs. Armed with a white stick and a bottle of baby oil, I took my recently acquired black sow, Maud, to the Devon County Show. The oil was for gleaming purposes, you understand. As I steered her around the ring (in front of recently acquired royalty, the Duchess of Cornwall, not to mention 80 per cent of the local electorate), I had a quiet word in her shell-like, ‘Behave! Or you will be joining the food chain!’ She did me proud. We got fourth place. The only drawback was being awarded a yellow rosette. For one awful moment I thought I had switched parties. Pigs might fly....
Ithink it is technically easier for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven than it is to register a pig with Defra. One needs a parish county holding number and a Defra herdmark number. These require round-robin calls to local animal welfare offices, Defra and the rural payments agency in Newcastle where contact is made, or not as the case may be, through an answering machine or a callhandling centre somewhere completely different. India probably. Eventually through the post comes a doorstopper of information on the single farm payment.
‘Look, I don’t want your money!’ ‘You don’t?’ ‘No, I just want to register one pig. Just one pig.’ ‘Oh ... but your pig is registered to a farm in Devon.’ ‘Yes, but she lives with her trainer in Dorset.’ ‘I don’t understand you, sir.’ ‘Imagine she’s a racehorse.’ ‘You said she was a pig, sir.’ ‘Just give me a herdmark number, will you?’ He didn’t. Maud is expecting. Each piglet will require me to go through this process. Is it any wonder farmers are leaving the land in their droves?
Iam also the proud owner of seven doves, those symbols of conjugal devotion. I had more than seven to start off with: ‘Donald’, ‘Condoleezza’, ‘Dubya’ et al., but the kamikaze attentions of the local raptor fraternity took them out one by one. This wretched government kowtowing to the RSPB league table of what is acceptable and unacceptable in animal behaviour is helping these assassins to proliferate to the exclusion of all else. Here in Devon, on the road between Holdsworthy and Hatherleigh, we have learnt that the ‘Buzzard of Brandis Corner’ is back. With a four-foot wingspan it has taken to attempting to decapitate cyclists — 26 of them to be precise. The RSPB is now asking cyclists to take another route at least till the chicks hatch. And a ghillie on the Tamar river has been told he can only cull cormorants at the rate of one a month; in other words, one in March, one in April, May and so on. Great. Additionally, he is not allowed to use a 2.2-, or 12-, 16or 20bore for the purpose. What is he to use? A butterfly net?
The statue of Sir Walter Raleigh, which I recently commissioned for my constituency, is nearing completion and will soon be seen in the village of East Budleigh, close to Raleigh’s birthplace, Hayes Barton. The only irritation is that Ash, the campaign against smoking, is objecting to the fact that I got British American Tobacco to cough up the money for it. Poor old Walter may have popularised tobacco, but he didn’t introduce it to England. Now potatoes, that’s a different matter altogether. The call from the antiobesity brigade is imminent.
Back to Bosnia. Paddy Ashdown is doing a good job here despite the unwarranted criticism he receives from some of our rightwing press. Paddy is clearly taken with the country which he rules like an old Indian viceroy. So much so that he has built himself the 21st-century equivalent of a Lutyens ViceRegal residence — a Finnish A-frame lodge, I am assured — on the banks of the Neretva river, where on a cold Balkan morning he can be seen performing energetic aquabatics first learnt in the Special Boat Squadron. He is encircled by his exhausted security detachment, rather like Mao swimming in the Yangtze. Now that is intimidation!
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