By the time you read this I will have delivered my long-awaited speech to the World Horse Welfare annual conference in the presence of the Princess Royal. I say ‘long awaited’ not because I have some inflated sense of how important I am. But because I have been working myself into a right old lather about it.
I was perfectly fine until the organisers sent me a few emails with useful information about the conference themes and asked me out for a coffee to discuss my speech.
‘Agh!’ I thought. ‘Why are they asking me what I’m going to say? I have no idea what I am going to say. But more to the point, why do they feel they need to ask me?’
In the bowels of the WHW headquarters, I became convinced, there were top people holding high-level discussions involving panic-stricken remarks along the lines of: ‘What have you booked her for, you idiot? Did you not read what she’s been writing about the RSPCA?
‘We’re going to have our conference ruined by a paranoid loony spouting conspiracy theories about secret horse-culling — and in front of Princess Anne!’
A few months ago, you see, I was involved in a story revealing that the RSPCA had loaded a dozen horses on to a lorry, driven them to a location many miles away and shot them.
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