Perhaps the most surprising part of Tony Blair’s memoirs is the passage in which he reveals one of his deepest regrets: it’s not Iraq, but the fox-hunting ban.
Blair now says that the 2005 reform was ‘a fatal mistake’ and even admits to having been swayed by a metropolitan bias against country dwellers. ‘I started to realise that this wasn’t a small clique of weirdo inbreds delighting in cruelty,’ he writes, ‘but a tradition, deeply embedded by history and profound community and social liens, that was integral to a way of life.’ Pro-hunting groups will see Blair’s admission as too little too late.
Nevertheless, his remarks represent quite a change coming from the man who once campaigned under the slogan ‘Vote Labour or the fox gets it’. And Blair’s volte-face prompts an interesting question for the new government: why has David Cameron, an outspoken defender of hunting before becoming Prime Minister, shied away from repealing the ban now that he is in power? In the Conservatives’ election manifesto, he promised to introduce a parliamentary free vote on decriminalising hunting with dogs.
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