Robin Oakley

The swallows who nest yearly in my garage have agreed that ‘that’s enough baby-making for this year’, and started their 6,000-mile trip to the southern Sahara. Between burps, many thousands of wildebeeste are currently sniffing the Kenyan air and nudging each other south for new shoots on the grassy plains of the Serengeti. To me, Newmarket’s Autumn Double meetings, embracing the Cambridgeshire and the Cesarewitch, bring the same strong sense of seasonal change with the second of those Heritage handicaps over two miles and two furlongs offering a strong challenge to the Flat trainers from jumps specialists warming up their charges for the winter season.

It takes a little bit of magic to train any racehorse. It takes plenty of magic to keep a 13-year-old sprinter bursting with energy and raring to go. I’m there applauding the superstars of British racing on many big occasions, but my racing moment of the year came in a woodland paddock behind Liphook Golf Club in Hampshire where, as he nuzzled his trainer John Bridger, Pettochside, a battle-hardened bay by Refuse To Bend with a white dab on his forehead, gratefully nibbled a few Polos from my hand and sniffed inquiringly at my notebook.

Irish trainer John F. O’Neill owes the stalls handlers at Goodwood a good drink or two. In Ireland this season he has run just three horses – Tullyhogue Fort, Daily Pursuit and Pink Fire Lilly – in a total of 13 races at an average starting price of around 100-1. None has won. Last Saturday, Pink Fire Lilly, who had finished twelfth of 13 in an undistinguished race in Killarney on her previous outing, lined up with three others at the start of the Group Three William Hill March Stakes. The favourite Hoo Ya Mal had a Timeform rating of 131, the Queen’s horse Perfect Alibi was rated 114 and the Cheveley Park Stud’s Animato 102. Pink Fire Lilly’s rating was a mere 73. She had no chance and could be backed at 125-1. But John F.

I don’t miss too many from the political world I once inhabited but I was saddened by the death of Sir Christopher Meyer, the diplomat who was famously made ambassador to Washington by Tony Blair with the instruction to ‘get up the arse of the White House and stay there’. Chris added pepper and salt to the niceties of the diplomatic scene: after being ambassador to Germany he agreed with Mark Twain that: ‘A German joke is no laughing matter.’ I enjoyed jousting with him in his days as John Major’s press secretary and the last time I met Chris, at a Jeffrey Archer party, I reminded him of the seating instruction he gave when planning his Downing Street leaving party: ‘Politicians and journalists one end, human beings at the other.

‘You’re being unfaithful,’ says the punter’s wife brandishing a note found in her husband’s suit pocket: ‘Dorothea 07440 521321.’ ‘No, no, darling that’s a horse I plan to back next week with its form figures.’ Marital harmony is restored. Three weeks later he arrives home to find his wife on the doorstep with suitcase packed and taxi waiting. ‘What’s all this?’ ‘You left your mobile in the hall. Your horse called.

President George W. Bush used to quote his fellow Texan Robert Strauss who famously declared: ‘You can fool some of the people some of the time, and those are the ones you need to concentrate on.’ Listening to the economic arguments of most of the candidates for the Tory leadership last week, they clearly take a similar view. If it’s honesty you want, stick to horse racing. In Newbury’s baking heat last Saturday, Grocer Jack, an expensive 700,000-guinea purchase from Germany for Prince Faisal bin Khaled, led all the way at a sometimes extravagant pace to win the Listed bet365 Stakes by nine lengths in the hands of Tom Marquand. Afterwards trainer William Haggas’s wife Maureen declared: ‘The performance was amazing.

Heading for a holiday in Sardinia, I remembered that the last time we were there our engine-less, drifting boat was rescued by a Mr Dettori. Mrs Oakley’s relief was tempered only by my disappointment that our saviour wasn’t Frankie or even a relative. This time it looks as though it is Frankie, the world’s favourite sardine, who might need rescue. Imagine Morecambe splitting with Wise or Torvill walking out on Dean. The racing world has focused on little else since John Gosden announced, after openly criticising some of his stable jockey’s rides at Royal Ascot, that he and Frankie Dettori are taking a sabbatical.

In a disintegrating country, stuck for the moment with a Prime Minister who can’t see the difference between a proliferation of photo-ops and the act of governing, we needed a Royal Ascot week. No racecourse in the world does photo-ops better than Ascot – the carriage processions, the toppers and tails (and yes, Madam, wear what appears to be a pair of mating macaws on your titfer if that is what rocks your boat), the bandstand singsongs. But at Ascot they know that the show counts for nothing without the substance and in its enthusiastic embrace of internationalism (another contrast with Downing Street) Ascot delivers, bringing top-class contestants from the United States, Australia, Japan, France and Germany to vie with Britain’s best.

In the absence on her Platinum Jubilee of Her Majesty, such an avid Derby attender in the past, and following the death just days before of the legendary Lester Piggott, it could have been a low-key, insignificant Derby. Instead, a truly impressive victory for the favourite, Desert Crown, turned it into a different kind of celebration. He had never really been away, but how the crowd welcomed the comeback when Desert Crown won Sir Michael Stoute his sixth Derby, becoming at 76 the oldest to perform the feat. The previous holder of the record was the 75-year-old Matt Dawson with Sir Visto in 1895, but in those days there were no Coolmores and Godolphins to face with their batteries of expensive, impeccably bred contestants.

Seeing Fully Wet win the European Breeders Fund Maiden Stakes at Goodwood on Saturday was a genuine source of pleasure, and not just because I had thought her the pick of the paddock and taken the 8-1. My previous ‘best in paddock’ had finished last. The good news was that Fully Wet was the first winner in Britain for Barry Schwartz, the former CEO of Calvin Klein who is a leading owner-breeder in the US. The fact that he and fellow owner Andrew Rosen have chosen to have the £120,000 filly trained in Britain by John and Thady Gosden was a ray of hope amid the gloom and doom over British prize money.

‘Some of our players can hardly write their names,’ moaned one leading football manager. ‘But you should see them add up.’ With soaring energy prices and grocery bills going up, up and up, we are all getting better at maths. My monthly energy bill has just risen by more than I paid for my first car so I need to find a Twelve to Follow this summer that will have the bookmakers making a contribution to the difference. After his domination of the early Flat scene, the most logical option would be to slip on a blindfold, poise a pin over the list of Charlie Appleby’s Godolphin stable inmates and take the first dozen it pierces. But there are more fun ways.

The Irish aren’t just good at winning horse races: they are in the Super League when it comes to celebrating victories. After Shark Hanlon’s Hewick had collected the £90,000 first prize in the bet365 Gold Cup at Sandown Park last Saturday, the red-haired trainer said with a twinkle: ‘The plan was to go home this evening. The plan just changed.’ I hope the craic was good: the year before, when Shark had his first Grade One victory with Skyace, he went home and fed 50 calves before opening a bottle of champagne only for his boxer bitch to start producing a series of eight pups – a process that engaged him until 5 a.m. There is nothing sinister about the name Shark.

For Barbara and Alick Richmond, Living Legend’s game 12-1 victory in Kempton’s 1m 2f Magnolia Stakes last Saturday was their first in a Listed race and it showed. Living Legend had been driven to the front two furlongs out and held on bravely to prevail by a nose. ‘Come here you,’ said Barbara to the treasured Joe Fanning, the veteran jockey who had judged his finish perfectly, and enveloped him in a huge affectionate hug. You felt that if she could she would have picked him up, tucked him under an arm and carted him home to sit on the mantelpiece as a trophy. Of Living Legend, a lightly raced six-year-old who has had injury problems since running in the Dee Stakes at three, she declared proudly: ‘What more could you ask for in a racehorse?

You don’t always have to win to enjoy it. At the end of the £100,000 Paddy Power Imperial Cup at Sandown on Saturday the exhilarated 7lb claimer Archie Bellamy jumped off Lively Citizen with a grin on his face you could have driven a car through. ‘I got some spin off that,’ he declared. ‘You’re turning in and he just takes off. I had such a lot of fun out there.’ So he had, riding a well-judged race on the 28-1 shot to take the lead two out and keeping on well. Lively Citizen’s handler David Jeffreys, who trains at Hinton on the Green, Worcestershire, proved almost equally chuffed: ‘He’s a real trainer’s horse,’ he beamed. ‘He wears his heart on his sleeve and gives you everything.

Even when the authorities were refusing Milton Harris the right to renew his training licence after he got his finances in a tangle and went bankrupt in 2011, they acknowledged that nobody questioned his ability to train racehorses. Nor can they. On Saturday, in Kempton’s Adonis Hurdle, Milton’s Knight Salute, purchased for just £14,000, took his unbeaten record over hurdles to five. His trainer has had 42 winners this season at a strike rate of 21 per cent and is one of the few British handlers ready to take on the Irish at Cheltenham this month. Knight Salute is a 10-1 shot for the Triumph Hurdle and no British victory would be more celebrated. Said MiIton: ‘The Irish horses are all talented but some of them have been beaten and we haven’t.

Certain sections of the media love to run a knocking story and when champion trainer Paul Nicholls’s horses failed to win as many races as usual over the past three weeks, the groaners were soon at it. Was the magic missing? Had the maestro mislaid his baton? The Nicholls response was characteristically bold. He sent out his star young chaser Bravemansgame, his best hope for the Cheltenham Festival, to contest a novice handicap at Newbury last Saturday in which he had to give lumps of weight to a couple of handy performers in the shape of Grumpy Charley and Pats Fancy.

The engine wasn’t what it was, they said. At ten years old the spark that had once made him a champion was flickering only intermittently at best. The fire in his belly had gone out. There had been five runs since his last victory and when Paisley Park, a horse who once nearly died of colic, whipped round at the start of Cheltenham’s Cleeve Hurdle last Saturday and gave his four top-class rivals a start of some 15 lengths it seemed all over. Ruby Walsh, the greatest Cheltenham jockey of them all, was watching for ITV. Asked if he would now persevere on Paisley Park he replied: ‘No, you don’t. You just give up and come back to the parade ring. He’s going round now in a race he can’t possibly win.

There is nothing like visiting a stud early in the foaling season. As amiable mums-to-be saunter up to the paddock rails, it both rekindles the basic passion — admiration for the magnificent animals that give us such pleasure contesting their prowess — and recharges the optimism sometimes sapped by racing’s structural problems. In Friday’s winter sunshine, at Alex and Olivia Frost’s Ladyswood Stud near Malmesbury, the Dubawi mare Empress Consort, once trained by Andre Fabré and now in foal to the mighty Frankel, nibbled my notebook while Malaya, formerly a classy hurdler with Paul Nicholls, arched her neck and nuzzled up to help Alex reach her favourite scratching spot.

Seen any groundhogs your way? In racing the New Year began much as the old one had ended. At Cheltenham’s New Year’s Day fixture, the Dornan Engineering Relkeel Hurdle feature race ended with Danny Mullins driving to victory Stormy Ireland, a horse trained across the water by his uncle Willie Mullins, after their only serious rival Brewin’upastorm had fallen at the last. Six days earlier, at Kempton Park on Boxing Day, it had been the same story with Tornado Flyer, ridden by Danny and trained by Willie, capturing the £142,000 prize for the celebrated King George VI Chase after his closest rival had capsized at the final obstacle. But while Stormy Ireland had been fairly well supported at 4-1, Tornado Flyer was a 28-1 shot.