T he story goes that my greatgrandfather Murray Finch Hatton, MP
for Lincolnshire in the 1880s and later 12th Earl of Winchilsea, shot an African tracker in the leg while big-game shooting in Kenya. Mortified by what he had done, he rushed forward and gave the tracker a golden guinea. The man limped off, but soon returned. He had consulted his wife, he said, and wondered if his lordship might kindly oblige by shooting him again. Dick Cheney didn’t need a golden guinea to buy the goodwill of Harry Whittington, 78, the multimillionaire Republican lawyer he shot two weeks ago while quail-shooting in south Texas. In fact, it is hard to imagine circumstances in which Whittington would allow any anger he might feel towards the Vice-President to become public. For Whittington is a Texas Republican loyalist, and the 50,000-acre Armstrong Ranch, where the shooting incident happened, is a sacred place for Republicans. To be asked to shoot there means being admitted into the Republican inner circle. Regular guests have included not only Cheney but the two Bush presidents, father and son, and George junior’s chief political strategist, Karl Rove. For a guest to publicise trouble or disharmony on the ranch would result in instant expulsion from this Republican elite. So Whittington, with up to 200 steel pellets from Cheney’s 28-bore shotgun buried in his face, neck and torso, and recovering from a minor heart attack caused by a pellet lodged in his heart, left hospital six days later declaring that ‘my family and I are deeply sorry for all that Vice-President Cheney and his family have had to go through this past week’. It was, he said, ‘much more serious’ than anything that had happened to him. He would probably have said the same if he had lost an eye.
Still residing at the Armstrong Ranch is Anne Armstrong, widow of the last owner, who was appointed by President Gerald Ford to be America’s ambassador to Britain in the 1970s. She was later a director of the Halliburton energy company when Cheney was its chief executive and a member of Laura Bush’s delegation to the Queen Mother’s funeral in London in 2002. That gives some idea of her political status. It was while Mrs Armstrong was still chatelaine of the Armstrong Ranch that Andrew Knight, former editor of the Economist and afterwards a senior henchman of first Conrad Black and then Rupert Murdoch, was struck and injured by a falling turkey while shooting there. So Harry Whittington is not the first guest of the Armstrongs to pay a price for his social or political ambitions.
Is there, I wonder, an estate in England that delivers the same heady mix of highclass sport and politics? The nearest thing is probably Wafic Said’s estate in Oxfordshire where top Conservative politicians, journalists, and businessmen go regularly to shoot disgustingly large numbers of pheasant. Wafic Said is an immensely rich Syrian-born Saudi citizen who brokered a colossal arms deal between Mrs Thatcher and the Saudi government. If one of his shooting guests were to pepper another with pellets, would we ever hear about it, I wonder?
We should not doubt Dick Cheney’s sincerity in describing the day he shot Harry Whittington as the worst day of his life. Shooting is his passion and his only relaxation. With his fancy Italian-made shotgun, his Texas snake boots and his orange jacket, he feels like one of the good ol’ boys and prides himself on his experience and professionalism. Apart from everything else, the Whittington incident must have delivered a shattering blow to his selfesteem. At the same time, we should not doubt that the shooting was entirely Cheney’s fault. First accounts given to the press implied, disgracefully, that Harry Whittington was to blame by failing to make his presence known as he returned from picking up a dead quail to rejoin Cheney in the advancing line of guns. But Cheney condemned himself on television when he said that he had swung round after a quail and fired into the sun (which must have been low, as it was 5.30 p.m.), and that this had affected his vision. As any sportsman will tell you, you should never shoot low into the sun, or indeed in any direction where you cannot see clearly what is in your line of fire. Even the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department which issued Cheney his hunting licence states this clearly in its safety rules: never even raise your gun, they say, unless you know what is in front of or behind your target.
Murray Finch Hatton didn’t only shoot big game. He once adopted a lion cub in South Africa, rescued it from the sea when it fell overboard during the voyage home, and kept it in his drawing-room at Haverholme Priory in Lincolnshire until visitors to the house showed such alarm that he regretfully gave it to London Zoo. Some may find it hard to believe, but the keenest shots and huntsmen are often the soppiest about animals. David Cameron’s passion for conservation is not, as is sometimes suggested, a novel Tory attitude, but one that has always been present among Conservatives. Denys Finch Hatton (he of Karen Blixen fame) was a nephew of Murray Finch Hatton and one of the great ‘white hunters’. He spent most of his life killing things, progressing from grouse in Scotland to pheasants in Lincolnshire to big game in Africa. But he was also one of the first great campaigners for animal conservation and for the creation of national parks in Africa. A new biography of Denys Finch Hatton — Too Close to the Sun by Sara Wheeler — is to be published by Jonathan Cape on 9 March. I am much looking forward to it. He was my grandmother’s first cousin, and my mother was always proud of the relationship. When she was very old, I told her that ‘cousin Denys’, as she called him, had achieved fame at last by being played in the film Out of Africa by Robert Redford. Unfortunately she had never heard of Robert Redford.
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