The Spectator’s Notes | 20 November 2004

Although hunt supporters are right to point out that people of all classes hunt, Labour MPs are equally right to see their ban on hunting, now at last being enacted, as a great blow against the upper classes. Very occasionally, you meet an upper-class person who is against hunting, but this is usually because of being made to do it by disliked parents, practically never because he or she considers it cruel. As for actually banning it, that way of thinking — passing laws

just because you don’t like something —

is foreign to the upper-class mind (perhaps instinct would be a better word). Hunting is close to the heart of an aristocratic approach to life because it is communal, dangerous, unintellectual, non-commercial, ceremonial, hierarchical and depends on a love and knowledge of animals. When Mr Jorrocks — famously unaristocratic — says that hunting is ‘the image of war without its guilt’, he is hot on the scent.