Downing Street wants to exploit foot-and-mouth: to vilify farmers and 'modernise' farming
PETER OBORNE
The principal merit, as far as Tony Blair is concerned, of the reshuffling of Downing Street staff after the general election is that dirty tricks have once again become deniable. By the end Alastair Campbell had become too large, too colourful and too hopelessly implicated in every piece of skulduggery that went on around the Prime Minister to carry credibility on the occasions when he tried to lie his way out of difficulty. Campbell's replacement as press secretary, Godric Smith. is another matter. Smith is straightforward and decent. A career civil servant, he has nothing in common with the gangsters, rogues and cheats who have made made themselves at home in Blair's Downing Street. Partly for that reason, he genuinely hasn't got a clue what's been going on. That is why he has been able this week, with a clear conscience, to reject suggestions that there was anything fishy in the way that stories about millionaire farmers appeared in last Sunday's press.
Few others shared Godric Smith's confidence. Ever since the foot-and-mouth epidemic began six months ago, people around Tony Blair have waged a vindictive, unscrupulous and unrelenting campaign to ensure that farmers rather than the government itself emerge as fall-guys for the calamity. Ministers have colluded in claims that farmers started the epidemic by not taking proper precautions, that they have ripped off the tax-payer by overcharging for the clean-up operation, and even that farmers have been deliberately spreading the disease. And now we have this grotesque smear that the epidemic has turned stockowners into millionaires.
It is impossible to prove one way or another whether ministers inspired the Sunday Times story, though internal evidence suggests that they did. What is beyond question is that the government machine deliberately fanned the flames. Godric Smith, in his wonderful innocence, blandly asserts that departmental press officers did nothing more than answer reporters' questions. But the government information service is no longer the cheerfully incompetent but on the whole neutral operation that served the Conservatives for 18 years and might have been happy to answer questions in the unlikely event that it was capable of finding the answers. One of the first things that New Labour did on winning power was to make the information service harder, more profes
sional — and stuffed with party henchmen. Press officers under New Labour never release information without a reason. Last weekend they could not have been more helpful. Information was available, even though (as later emerged) the money has not yet been paid out, and the final decision about compensation not even been made in most cases. One Sunday editor said, 'We tried to follow up four stories. We only succeeded with foot-and-mouth. The press officer came back to us instantly and did not even ask what story we were chasing before plying us with information.'
The purpose of this disreputable operation is obvious. One of the most unpleasant characteristics of New Labour is its readiness to demonise vulnerable groups. The tactics on display last week have already been tried out on so-called 'fat-cats', hospital consultants and lorry drivers. In a loathsome ploy, Downing Street is determined to harness urban hostility to and incomprehension of the countryside in order to win the public-relations battle and isolate agricultural people. The smear in the Sunday papers was a classic softening-up exercise for Monday's announcement that Lord Haskins, head of Northern Foods and a Downing Street crony, is to take charge of the 'rural recovery programme'. This was an amazing appointment. Putting a supermarket boss in charge of the countryside is like making Reynard the Fox national co-ordinator for chicken coops. Lord Haskins has never made any secret of his contempt for British farmers, and allowing him to determine their fortunes at a time when agriculture is struggling to emerge from its greatest setback since the agricultural depression of the 1870s is an act of open aggression. It is a signal that Downing Street is determined to exploit foot-and-mouth to vilify farmers and then — to use Tony Blair's favourite and ever so menacing word — modernise farming practices in Britain.
What the Prime Minister will not do, however, is give in to calls for an independent public inquiry into the disaster. There are pressing questions of overwhelming public interest which cry out for answers. We do not know why foot-and-mouth turned into an epidemic in Britain, while it was easily contained in other countries. We need to know why it started, whether it was waste food from a Chinese restaurant (a claim fostered for several weeks but ultimately denied by government) or some other source. We do not know whether mass culling made a real difference, or whether it was merely a short-term ploy designed to suit the government's electoral timetable. We do not know the truth about vaccination. We do not know whether burning or burial was the best solution. We have to know the answers to these questions so that we can learn the lessons and ensure that nothing comparable happens again.
Just before the parliamentary recess the Prime Minister claimed in the Commons that the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons shared his reservations about a fullscale inquiry. The current edition of the Veterinary Record makes a nonsense of that assertion. A letter from Barry Johnson and Bob Michell, past president of the RCVS, expresses concern about the 'repeated misrepresentation in parliament' of what the RCVS council called for in June. 'The inquiry,' write Johnson and Michell, 'must be free to pursue all aspects, including the political aspects, with the aim of learning lessons for the future.'
The shameful suspicion is that Tony Blair is scared witless of an independent inquiry because he fears that it will show that the real blame lies with incompetence and venality in government, and nowhere near the farmers that Downing Street is so keen to smear. Any well-founded inquiry into how the epidemic spread so fast is bound to ask why ministers ignored warnings that food was being smuggled into Britain from infected countries, why the government was so slow to react when the crisis started, why carcasses were left to rot in fields, why the army was only brought in after foot-andmouth had been raging for six weeks, and how ministers constantly came to make false assurances that all was well. The footand-mouth crisis of 2001 may yet become as damaging for Tony Blair as arms-to-Iraq was for John Major.
Ihave had only two brushes with footand-mouth so far. The first was a desperate moment at the height of the crisis in the spring, when the factor of the Scottish estate on which we have a cottage, usually the cheeriest and friendliest of men, knocked on the door and announced, 'Your dog has been found running loose on the Table of Lorne. His face was as long as a mackerel. The dog is a criminal anyway, having at different times in the past driven a sheep into the sea, killed a neighbour's pet cockerel and eaten another neighbour's pet rabbit. Now it had gone nuclear. An entire nation's livestock was under threat. On one of its emergency pee-stops through England it was bound to have picked up the disease. 'It's worse than that,' the factor said, scratching the back of his skull, a sure sign of irritation. Your dog was found up there this morning by Jon Snow.' The superstar TV news presenter was staying in another house on the same estate. My name was on the label around the dog's neck. It could scarcely be more catastrophic. We could all imagine the following week's Channel 4 News: 'Holiday journalist flouts FMD regulations, destroys Highland economy; what do you have to say, Mr Nice'son?' A media siege would follow, the dog would have to be put down and I would be beginning a new career writing alcoholic short stories in Mauritius.
Thank God nothing came of it, but this week the dread disease has come closer to home in Sussex. Our six beautiful conkerred cows have been grazing contentedly in an all-girl creche on the top field for months. They have been nuzzling each other and swishing each other's noses like novices on a picnic. That couldn't he allowed to last. Cows are there to have calves, and so I have bought in some testosterone. The bull, an enormously beautiful beast, is on hire for three weeks. He was out recently with a herd on Romney Marsh, was said to be full of vim and so was obviously our man. A woman from the Department of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs accompanied his lorry in her own van. She was much too nice and courteous. Poor woman, she must have spent a lifetime being nice to farmers, every one of whom loathed and distrusted her very presence in their yards. There hasn't been a whiff of foot-and-mouth in East Sussex, but the regulations covering the movement of animals apply nationwide. For big, beautiful Ferdinand to travel to us from Romney Marsh in this time of national crisis, he had to be accompanied not only by a ten-page passport but by this charming woman as his escort. The haulier looked at the clouds,
muttering that Mr Blair was out to destroy rural England, as she explained this to me, and the fee involved. Fine. The ramp was let down, the bull came stumbling out into the sunshine and within microseconds he spotted the girls among the buttercups. Evidence of his delight sprouted beneath him — you remember that wonderful Nasa footage of a Saturn V leaving the pad — and his body took on the trotting, bouncing motion you sometimes see in people at drinks parties. The cows tossed their heads like teenagers flicking the hair from their eyes. The lady from Defra drew me away from this transfixing sight. I was to sign the form here. here and here. I scarcely read it, but I did notice one paragraph. The animal to which this movement order applied 'must be kept separate from other animals for 21 days'. 'But he's only here for 21 days,' I said. 'Well, you know,' she said, grinning — the friendly bureaucrat, the official who lives in the real world — 'people can always leave a gate open by accident, can't they?' Colin Pilbeam, who works on the farm, and I looked at each other. Could she really be saying that? I stared at the field. The drinks party had become a serial orgy. Colin, Mrs Defra, the lorry driver and I had an appalled, complicit laugh together. 'Up and running. I see,' the haulier said, the joke that is always made in Sussex on these occasions.
The whole foot-and-mouth drama must have been full of episodes like this, the muddled and compromised edge of a bureaucratic system in panic, making universal rules, none of which respond to local conditions, a paper system that even the officials realise is unenforceable. I wonder if wartime Britain felt like this, official life and real life sliding past each other with about as much attention as Ferdinand was paying to the sheep in the cow field. My farming neighbours are full of stories that reek of Dad's Army muddle. One of the pyres in Kent, I am told, was half-finished when its builders ran out of coal. No more was to be had and so for days ministry men were driving round north Kent from garage to garage buying coal in the yellow plastic 25kg bags intended for people's car boots. A man in Cumbria, after looking at his animals on a Sunday morning, suspected his flock had caught the disease. He rang the ministry number all Sunday. No answer. Only on Monday morning was there anyone there to pick up the phone, 24 hours after the virus had first begun to waft and billow across his neighbour's fields. It is obvious that there needs to be a proper inquiry after the event. Why the government refuses to have one is something of a mystery.
We've left Colin in charge of Ferdinand and the girls and come north to Scotland again for a holiday. Shopping in the Fort William Safeway's, I was troubled by something Charles Moore wrote on this page a couple of weeks ago. It's true, you can't buy shampoo for greasy hair any more. In the straight-talking 1970s my mother used to buy me shampoo for 'Dead and Greasy Hair' without any sense of shame or guilt on either side, but the era of real candour has gone. It's a loss that fills me with nostalgia. In Safeway's I made an arbitrary stab for something that seems to do the trick. Can I recommend Schwarzkopf s excellent 'Volumising Shampoo for Flyaway Hair'? It is particularly effective if the natural volume of one's hair is a little diminished, but the photographs of Jemima Khan relaunching the anti-euro campaign this week made it perfectly obvious that she, too, is a volumising, flyaway kind of girl; and what better recommendation could Charles have than that?
Previous page
