The Sketch: He may be a dullard but Mr Michael's compromise is as cunning as a fox
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Your support makes all the difference."Here is the rest of your fox!" the model says in the anti-hunting advertisement, holding up a skinned creature that is supposed to make us weep tears of terror and pity.
Honestly, don't these people go to butchers' shops? Where do they think mince comes from? The mince-meat fields?
Have they never walked through an abattoir withthe blood flowing and the beasts lowing in grief for their abbreviated lives? Neither have I. Who wants to be turned into a vegetarian?
Cruelty shall not be licensed? Alun Michael kept saying this as if he were offering to abolish the general slaughter that furnishes our family dinner tables.
Mr Michael is one of Parliament's amiable dullards, so he has the two qualities most essential for his mission.
For most of the year he has worked away, collecting evidence about hunting with dogs, balancing cruelty against utility. He has produced proposals that look sensible, workable and even adroit.
They had the added merit of turning the House into a barnyard. Even while he commended the interest groups for the mature and measured way they had presented their evidence, the House chattered, cheered, hissed, trilled, and parped imaginary hunting horns. Any display of emotion – a slightly raised voice counted as a display of emotion – prompted jeering whoops.
Their behaviour was, in short, exemplary.
Mr Michael has passed the decision about whether hunting should be banned to a new tribunal. Those who wish to hunt with dogs shall have to persuade this panel of three that there are too many foxes to hunt any other way, and that other forms of pest control would be crueller than tearing them to pieces (believe me, such ways exist). This will provide for a ban on hunting via the back door, something Mr Michael denied. It will also allow working-class hunters to continue ratting and rabbiting and otherwise hunting with dogs in the way they like.
Tony Banks praised Mr Michael for his efforts and said his task had been the equivalent of receiving the black spot from Blind Pugh, "but in all friendliness" Mr Banks warned him, he was in danger of ending up as piggy in the middle. This would, he said, inevitably lead to pig sticking. Pig sticking involves chasing terrified swine and shoving spears into them.
That's how it is with these politicians: in an instant, a childish game turns into a Tarantino nightmare.
Kate Hoey demonstrated the utility of the fox by draping an entire specimen round her neck. Douglas Hogg tried to draw an equivalence between hunting and angling but was howled down by bloodthirsty socialists.
Nicholas Soames slowly rose out of the Conservative benches like a volcanic island emerging from the sea. He silenced the jeers by commending Mr Michael for his dignified inquisition but asked a significant question: "If the Burns report provided the intellectual infrastructure for Mr Michael, why had he included cruelty as a criterion at all?" Lord Burns found no evidence of cruelty in fox hunting. This seemed to eviscerate Mr Michael's argument, but so quickly that the victim remained unaware of it. A triumph, in all, of utility over cruelty.
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