Back to the Land

The Velvet Revolution was 20 years ago. It’s about time we got back to the land and engineered a 21st-century Tweed Revolution

At Finch’s Quarterly Review we usually like to retain a lofty indifference to domestic British politics. We move on an altogether grander stage, busying ourselves with the important things in life: the arts, literature, philanthropy, the correct height of the armhole in a tweed jacket, the optimum depth of a turnup and so on. However, there are times when we feel the need to give a light nudge to the tiller on the ship of state and, before the new session of parliament commences, there are a few thoughts that we would like to share with our elected servants in the Palace of Westminster.

Forget the expenses row; that is water under the bridge or, more accurately, water in the newly cleaned moat. What we at Finch’s Quarterly Review would like to see is a more patrician style of politics. Although it may sound contrapuntal, I don’t think Gordon Brown is doing such a bad job – true, his remarks about having ended the cycle of boom and bust may have been a little on the premature side, but he is a serious man doing what he can in serious times. Moreover, given the unpopularity of the Labour regime, I reckon that Charles and I could cobble together a political party and stand a chance of sweeping into power… I reckon it is about time for a Tweed Revolution.

I think that it falls to the Tories to lead the way in bringing more of a touch of the grouse moor and the stately home into political life. I do not have a stately home, nor do I shoot grouse – they are too small and they move too quickly, but this open-necked, Twitter-twatting, Notting-Hill-dinner-party-politics style of opposition has gone far enough. I think matters reached a risible nadir when a member of the party once led by Peel, Disraeli and Churchill compared parts of Britain to the television crime drama The Wire – should we really be electing a government that devises policy on the basis of the American television programmes it watches? At least he could have come up with something more amusing; I might have been tempted if the Tories presented a manifesto based on classic US telly such as The Dukes of Hazzard, The Munsters, The Flintstones, Bewitched, Miami Vice, Moonlighting and, not forgetting the female vote, Desperate Housewives (Tory strategists, take note: we have one resident of Wisteria Lane writing in this number of FQR). But The Wire…?

I think instead that we must look for the Tories to cast aside their pop culture and assume their traditional role as the party of the landed interest. One only has to think back to the great march through central London orchestrated by the Countryside Alliance to know that the country is a powerful and important constituency.

And yet one does not hear so much of the “landed interest” these days. Of course, it was all very different in the 1840s, when Sir Robert Peel’s government was torn apart by rebellion over the Repeal of the Corn Laws led by Lord George Bentinck, and it would be a pity if today’s Tories lost contact with the land while wooing Twitterers and middle-class urban cyclists, even though I myself am among the latter demographic. I was therefore thrilled to learn that at least one Tory was claiming expenses for cleaning his moat; this is exactly the sort of behaviour that I welcome from a Conservative politician. After all, if the world’s bankers had spent more time on the upkeep of their castles and country houses, then we wouldn’t be in the trouble that we are today.

The thing is, I’m a sucker for the old England of tweedy squires; that blissful prelapsarian world of PG Wodehouse’s immortal creation Blandings Castle: a place of perpetual summer where a prize pig called The Empress of Blandings is the sun around which an entire planetary system of endearing British stereotypes revolves.

I was thinking of PG Wodehouse when I came across an old party political broadcast for Harold Macmillan’s Tory Party. Now there was a Tory politician the nation could be proud of. Sitting in what looked suspiciously like the library of some grandee’s stately home, it was almost as if the camera had stumbled across a group of amiable old codgers mid-conversation at some weekend shooting party. And let us not forget that there was something to be said for the Macmillan way of doing things – it was, after all, the time when Britain had never had it so good.

I must add here that I am not a landowner… unless you count the dozen square metres or so of mock York stone-paved West London back yard, ownership of which I share with the Cheltenham & Gloucester. And while I may not wish to participate in hunting, I like the tradition and style of the thing and think there are many worse things in the world than a group of people putting on fancy dress and embarking on a little bit of mounted pest control. I don’t have to live there to know that the country is important.

And so this, the autumnal issue, is loosely arranged around the theme of “Back to the land”. You know the sort of thing: mists, mellow fruitfulness, fruit filled with ripeness to the core, gourds, nuts and the all the other accoutrements that Mr John Keats conjured up in his Ode. And so we citizens of Finchland turn our hands to the soil, whether growing olives in Medina Sidonia with The Ivy’s Fernando Peire, or digging up truffles with Evgeny Lebedev in Italy. And as for livestock, we are brimming with it: Annabel Goldsmith on dogs, Bronwen Astor on fish, Roger Saul on deer…

But, as well as a time of bounty, autumn is also a melancholy time. The year is starting to die and there is an elegiac quality about Keats’s poem that I think we have managed in this issue of Finch’s Quarterly Review, whether it is Matthew Modine mourning the passing of the drive-in cinemas of his childhood, or me whingeing about the difficulty in finding really heavy tweed.

But most of all, this sense of a dying world is captured with Dafydd Jones’s vintage images of hunting, hunt balls and point-to-point meetings. I first met Dafydd at some ball or other at Oxford in the winter of 1983, and I have followed him and his work ever since, his eye for the telling and mordant detail is still as sharp as ever and his pictures are a photographic counterpart to the novels of Simon Raven and Evelyn Waugh. Unfortunately, he would not let us publish his picture of dinner-jacketed Hooray Henries leaping over a burning boat or of a woman being pushed into a swimming pool; nevertheless, he gave us the run of the rest of his archive and we have come up with an intriguing selection of snapshots of a world that was vanishing before his eyes… Well, not all of it has gone. Among the pictures we turned up is an interesting one of a young George Osborne at the Bullingdon Club point-to-point in a group of floppy-haired, tweedy youngsters who look suspiciously like a cabal of treasury-advisers-in-waiting.

- Nick Foulkes is Editor in Chief of Finch’s Quarterly Review

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