Don’t blame Chris Packham for the shooting ban

Last week, on the first day of the government’s ban on farmers shooting pest birds, I walked across St James’s Park and came across a pigeon murdered by a crow. It was on its back, wings spread, with a nasty hole torn in its chest. It looked like a botch job by an amateur heart surgeon, or an allegory for the whole messy, sorry affair.

The ban — a sudden revoking of the old general licences to shoot — was announced right in the middle of the crop-sowing season by Natural England, a semi-autonomous offshoot of Defra. It consulted no one and gave baffled farmers just a few days’ notice, insisting that this was the only possible course of action after lobbying group Wild Justice claimed the licences were illegal.

Wild Justice was founded by the punky little TV presenter Chris Packham and now the countryside has risen up in revolt against him.