There was no doubt that numbers were down. Where Stormerod had originally expected the Conservative benches to be full, there were now several gaps. But although the word was that a few names had been withdrawn from the speakers’ list, there were enough for Amiss, sitting in the front row of spectators just to the right of the baroness, to be resigned to a long session.
Lady Parsons kicked off very much in the style of the Islington public meeting. She spent little time on the uncontentious clauses, but when she got to hunting, the detailed facts and figures tumbled out followed by the moral denunciation: there was no place for the anachronistic pursuits of the idle rich in a modern society facing the challenge of the European Union. It was disgraceful that country people should still carry such traditional baggage from the shameful days of Empire.
She sat down to obedient but unenthusiastic ‘hear, hears’. Stormerod came next. His unassuming, urbane tone was ideally suited to the Lords. ‘I should like to congratulate the noble and learned baroness on her mastery of the evidence for the prosecution. Such is her skill that I wished she might have turned her redoubtable talents to the defence—where I am sure she would have made an even better case. She, whose concern for the underprivileged is so well known, could not have failed to be moving on the subject of the damage that would be done to ordinary people in so many professions if this bill went through.’
He dwelt movingly and in sequence on the plight of the huntsmen and the houndsmen whose lives had been dedicated to the ancient trades in which they took such pride.
‘I am not myself a huntsman, so it might surprise you that I am opening for the defence of that sport, but then the noble and learned baroness is not a fox.’ This piece of wit elicited polite laughter from all over the house, fortunately drowning out to all but those in the Baroness Troutbeck’s immediate vicinity the mutter, ‘But she is a bloody vixen.’ Gently and in the pragmatic manner that befitted an elder statesman, Stormerod talked of those parts of the bill with which he was entirely happy and then about what made hunting different. Why was it, he asked, that as with capital punishment, every time the House of Commons had given proper consideration to the hunting issue, reason had triumphed over prejudice and the visceral popular demand to abolish the one and reinstate the other had been rejected? Now it was for the Lords to make sure that irrationality did not prevail.
Brother Francis, aka the Lord Purseglove, could not compete with this. Where Stormerod fitted in with the ambience of the Lords like a top hat at Ascot, Brother Francis looked as out of place as an anorak. Amiss knew enough of the Lords by now to appreciate that while eccentricity was part and parcel of the place, it had to be within clearly defined parameters. You could be shabby, boring, dotty, absent-minded, repetitive, and a bit of a drunk, but anything that smacked of the spiv, the cad, or the crank made you, by definition, an outsider. Brother Francis’ dress, from his plastic sandals to his clerical collar, did not put his audience at their ease. Apart from anything else, as Sid had explained to Amiss, there was deep disapproval that he was sitting on the cross benches in clerical gear. To the Lords, clergy were bishops: they sat on the benches of the Lords Spiritual in a properly hierarchical manner, archbishops to the fore on the benches with the arm rests. It was muddling to have a member of the clerical lower orders turning up and suggested that the chap was obviously unsound.
Like Lady Parsons, Brother Francis had made few concessions to a change of audience, though he had the wit to begin with a waffly wringing of hands about how dreadful violence was and how he hated it as much when it was applied to man as to beast. He had also left out his verses and his hymn; clearly he was not such an innocent as to be unaware that the Lords were likely to be a bit conservative about their hymn sheet. But he did produce an apposite verse from Cowper:
…Detested sport,
That owes its pleasure to another’s pain;
That feeds upon the sobs and dying shrieks
of harmless nature…
Yet though his sincerity earned him a sympathetic hearing, he kept annoying their lordships. It was, for instance, clear to Amiss from the shocked expressions within his vision that it did not go down well to address peers as: ‘My noble brothers and sisters.’ Nor did his syrupy sentimentality appeal either to those of rural background—the majority of the hereditary mob—or to those who had fought their way up the greasy poles of politics, academia, law, or business. In choosing him as her seconder, Lady Parsons had shown how little she understood the institution.
Deptford came next and—as an old Lords hand—got the tone completely right. Simply and directly, he told the autobiographical story of how hunting had brought joy, excitement, and an understanding of the cycle of nature to a boy from the most underprivileged of backgrounds. And he raised a laugh by telling of his delighted amazement in finding the sport egalitarian. ‘As the great hunting journalist, Nimrod, explained: “A butcher’s boy upon a pony may throw dirt in the face of the first duke in the kingdom.”’
It should not be thought that only the right defended hunting, as the Labour Minister for Agriculture had shown when he opposed the antihunting bill of 1949 on the grounds that it was not for townsmen to attack the life of the countryside. Yet here we were now contemplating allowing an ‘urban dictatorship’ to prevail. The murmurs and ‘hear, hears’ throughout the speech were frequent and genuine.
The antis had pulled off a coup with the next speaker, for Lord Pangbourne was a convert from field sports, who waxed eloquent about the cruelty he had seen and indeed participated in before he saw the light. He produced gruesome descriptions of foxes being dug out before being thrown to the hounds, and other revolting examples which Amiss recognized as standard in antihunting literature—always countered by the pros as exceptions and always cited by the antis as typical. But Pangbourne was lucid and at times shocking and—Amiss calculated—probably cancelled out Deptford.
It was with apprehension that he saw Poulteney rise, though with relief that he saw Poulteney clinging on hard to the typescript Amiss had given him. Without stumbling too much, he talked as instructed about tradition, about how all classes united in this great test of vigour and courage. He talked of how restrictive was the social life of the country with little to do but go to the pub or watch television. What hunting offered was an opportunity for vigorous physical exercise that brought the community together, got people out in the open air, gave them a day’s excitement and enjoyment and pride in their own achievement, and brought to newcomers from the towns some appreciation of how nature worked.
He went off the point once. It was clearly beyond him to resist telling the story he told over and over again of the foreigner who went to a fox hunt. The people, horses, and dogs were in the best of spirits, the sky was blue and the air was brisk but not sharp. Everyone was in rattling good form and a good day’s sport seemed certain until disaster struck. The fox, instead of breaking free and leading hounds, horses, and men a merry dance, faltered and was caught and killed before he left cover. ‘The foreign gentleman,’ gurgled Poulteney, as he always did at this point, ‘thereupon turned to the Master of Foxhounds and said, “Oh my Lord Duke, I congratulate you on having killed that animal so soon and with so little trouble!”’ Amiss ground his teeth. While he had advised strongly against representing hunting as vermin control, he had not wished Poulteney to talk of disappointment at a quick kill. Still, considering Poulteney’s normal style and the few speeches of his he had read in Hansard, he marvelled at his own brilliance in managing to produce a performance as good as this one.
The next anti was a gift. As an ex-Minister for Health, he explained, Lord Newman was concerned not with animals but with protecting people—from themselves, if needs be. He launched into a self-congratulatory passage about various reforms he had instituted which had cut back on accidents in school playgrounds, on playing-fields, and in the boxing ring. It was his dearest wish that the element of danger be removed as far as possible from British life. Boxing must be banned and helmet and pads made compulsory in all team sports. To pass the antihunting bill would be to save a significant number of lives and prevent a large number of injuries. Amiss scribbled a few lines and gave them to an attendant to pass to the baroness, who turned round after reading them and gave him the thumbs up.
The debate wore on for another hour or so, throwing up Admiral Lord Gordon, an apoplectic Master of Foxhounds whom Stormerod had never been able to corral into the group and who spent most of his speech going on about saboteur scum and the need to bring back National Service, flogging, the stocks, capital punishment and a clip across the ear from a policeman to any child who cheeked him in the street. Animals were therefore the convenience of man to do with them whatever they liked.
Beesley did rather better than this only because Amiss had done a heroic job in converting his ‘We-won’t-stand-for-it’ thesis into a coolly argued protest against criminalizing a highly respectable section of the population by forbidding people to do what their fathers and forefathers had done. He had also pre-empted Beesley’s likely worst excesses by allowing him to dilate on the subject of how hunting brought out in people the qualities of courage, coolness under pressure, presence of mind and concern for one’s companion in danger that were of such immeasurable value to members of the armed forces. Amiss winced slightly when Beesley brought in the paragraph he had written himself and was very proud of: ‘My noble friends. Often in life we have to say how we judge another man. One may say, “I would go into a slit-trench with him.” Another may say, “I would go into the jungle with him.” I say, “I would ride to hounds with him and trust him to keep a cool and clear head and act at all times like a sportsman.” As a country, as a people, we cannot afford wantonly to throw away this training ground, this breeding ground of our future leaders of men on the battlefield.’
Though Beesley was not a disaster, he was not a great success. However, he was cancelled out by the fifth Baron Neville, a dedicated Marxist, who droned on about the class war and the need to abolish the rich and their degenerate pursuits. By the time the baroness rose, Amiss’ notebook was full of the elaborate geometric doodles that always testified to deep tedium. But he sat up when—dressed for the occasion in an arresting scarlet jacket—she began to speak. It was clear from the outset that her homework had paid off, particularly the slogging over Hansard and the confabulations with Stormerod about how to affect the appropriate modesty for a maiden speaker without undergoing a complete personality change. She had taken his advice that when in doubt, one should opt for flattery.
What an old fraud, thought Amiss affectionately, as he listened to her inject into her voice a tremulous note as she begged the indulgence of the noble lords towards a speech which must perforce—because her first in this noble house—be faltering and inadequate. She craved their indulgence for her apparent arrogance in making her maiden speech after such a very short time in the House but begged their forgiveness on two grounds. The first was that when she had been a mere civil servant she had been a frequent member of the audience, for because the standard of debate was here so much higher than in another place, she had taken every opportunity to attend. And second, because this was a subject so important—not just to her but to the nation as a whole and the preservation of its heritage—that she could not have forgiven herself if she had not stood up and been counted. This was more important than ever now, since as the noble lords were aware, a failure to speak or a failure to vote to preserve this aspect of our national life might be taken by the enemies of democracy—spearheaded by the Animal Avengers, the Animal Liberation Army, the Hunt Saboteurs and all the many other extreme groups—as a reward for their evil, threatening tactics. If they were to scent blood, who knew what might follow.
Her main theme was courage, which she used as a prism through which to pick off one by one the speakers for the motion. Lady Parsons was denounced politely as someone who lacked the courage to accept the national character for what it was: brave, individualistic, and with a deep sense of history and a commitment to conserving the British way of life that had kept it for many centuries a beacon of sanity and stability in a world of torment and upset.
‘The noble baroness would do better to take us as we are,’ she announced, as Parsons sat grimly staring into the middle distance, ‘with our foibles and peculiarities and our eccentricities. She should not try to legislate us into blandness and homogeneity.’
She skewered Brother Francis on his lack of realism: ‘If you push people beyond their level of tolerance, you do more harm than good.’ While she applauded deep devotion to animal welfare, he was attempting to bring about not only—as Baroness Parsons had done—a fundamental change in human nature, but also, even more ambitiously, he wished to change, even deny, the nature of animals.
In his mysterious way, God had ordained that most animals—and man was an animal—fed on each other. It might seem cruel but it was reality and it was not for us to question in this regard the divine plan. As she came out with this, knowing Jack’s happy atheism, Amiss had to suppress a sardonic grin. She did a particularly neat job on Pangbourne, using to tremendous effect to denounce the Nanny State the verse Amiss had passed over to her. Her voice rang round the chamber and earned by Lords standards a tremendous outbreak of approving murmurs with Adam Lindsay Gordon’s lines:
No game was ever worth a rap
For a rational man to play,
In which no accident, no mishap,
Could possibly find its way.
What had this England that Lord Pangbourne was trying to bring about to do with the England of Alfred the Great and Henry V and Winston Churchill—a world in which Cavaliers rode into battle with daring and derring-do and laughter on their lips?
And, she went on, if she might make so bold, she wished to point out too that courage was not confined to the male sex. Mere women (Amiss feared she was beginning to go slightly over the top here) like Boadicea, Queen Elizabeth I and, more recently, Lady Thatcher, had shown that English-women too have stout hearts. There were those among the noble lords who would remember great exhibitions of courage on the hunting field, which sometimes led to tragedy. But did anyone believe that that great lady, the late wife of the noble Lord Poulteney, would have held back from hunting for a day had she known that her life would end during a chase? Amiss looked rather nervously at Poulteney at this juncture, wondering if she had gone too far and hoping she had cleared it with him first, but he was showing no reaction. He lay back on the bench gazing at the ceiling.
‘And courage, my noble friends, is what this debate is about. For not only must we preserve hunting for reasons of conservation of tradition, of the good of the local community, and because it is the least cruel method of keeping down foxes, but because it is our duty to resist what can now only be called terrorism. What was once peaceful protest has changed to civil disobedience and has recently degenrated into criminality; it is a veritable threat to the stability of the kingdom itself.
‘Those who have sought to intimidate some noble lords into acting against their consciences underestimate their mettle. They have underestimated too the intellect of the Lords whom I have the honour to address for the first time, who cannot fail to realize that to give way on this issue will lead inexorably to terrorist agitation on a host of other issues. If we knuckle under now, we will give great heart to those people who wished to terrorize us into becoming a nation of whey-faced vegans.’
She sat down to more supportive noises than any other speaker had yet attracted, both because the speech had been entertaining and because convention required encouragement for a maiden speaker. Yet a few lords refrained from cheering. Amiss was surprised to see that even within his restricted field of vision two lords on the Conservative benches showed no emotion whatsoever; he assumed them to be vegetarians. He guessed Poulteney’s failure to show support meant he thought it bad form to show approval of a speech in which his wife had been praised.
The last three speeches contributed very little that was new, and during the last Amiss found himself nodding off. He awoke with a start, feeling slightly guilty, though looking round at the number of recumbent forms he felt his guilt misplaced. It was a relief when Lady Parsons stood up to give the winding-up speech. He found her surprisingly unimpressive, being one of those debaters who merely repeat their earlier points and appeared not to understand the questions raised. The hunt employees of whom Stormerod had spoken, she explained, would simply have to retrain in modern skills. She sneered at Beesley’s argument about the qualities required by a member of the armed forces by remarking that the days of the cavalry were well and truly over. And to Poulteney’s point about the importance of the hunt in the social life of rural communities, she said shortly that when their sport was outlawed, it was for them to find some legal leisure pursuit: principle was all. Brisk, complacent and righteous, she brought the debate to an end at ten-twenty.
‘The question is that this bill be read a second time,’ called out the Lord Chancellor. ‘As many as are of that opinion will say, “Content”. The contrary, “Not content”.’ There was a chorus of ‘Content’ from Labour and the Bishops’ benches and a few more from the Conservative and cross benches. As expected, there were no ‘Not contents’.
As Lord Broadsword, the government whip, stood up to move the adjournment, the baroness bustled out of the enclosure and jerked her head at Amiss, who followed her obediently into the lobby.