BY ALEXIA JAMES
Jenny Riddell-Carpenter (pictured), Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Nature no less, awakes at 3am in a cold sweat. The nightmare is always the same: a pub. A pint of Adnams. A black Labrador. A fox hunt in the background. She reaches for her phone and drafts a conference speech.
It was a quiet Monday in Liverpool when the Labour Party gathered to discuss the future of rural Britain. The fringe meeting was modest. The sandwiches were triangular. And then Jenny Riddell-Carpenter, the newly appointed Nature Minister and MP for Suffolk Coastal, stood up and confessed her darkest fear.
It was not, as one might have assumed, the collapse of biodiversity. It was not the closure of the last village shop in her constituency. It was not even the sewage in the rivers.
It was a Labrador.
Specifically, a black Labrador. Sitting by a fire, in a pub. With warm ale. And fox-hunting symbolism all around.
This, she told the room, was the far-right nostalgic vision of Britain that kept her awake at night. A vision, she clarified, that never really existed.
One imagines the Minister tossing and turning in her Westminster flat, tormented by the phantom scent of hops and wet dog. The horror. The sheer, unbridled menace of it all.
The trouble is that the Minister, being a politician, had not done her homework. Had she consulted a map, or indeed her own social media history, she might have noticed something awkward.
For starters, the woman had personally posted photographs of a black Labrador sitting in front of a fireplace. This is what Sunday breaktime looks like, she wrote in 2015. She had also shared pictures of herself pulling a pint behind the bar of the Red Lion in Martlesham, the pub where she used to work.
The Minister, it transpires, was not describing a far-right fantasy. She was describing her own Sunday afternoons.
This is the political equivalent of standing up at a party conference and denouncing the concept of cake, only to be reminded by a heckler that you posted a photo of yourself eating a Victoria sponge three years ago.
The rural community, having been informed that its entire way of life was a fascist hallucination, responded with the dignity one might expect.
Harriet Cross, the Scottish Conservative MP, revealed that she owns a black Labrador called Maya and is frequently seen walking three of them at once. I don’t know how far right that makes me, she said. The Shadow Scottish Secretary, it seems, is a sleeper agent for the canine wing of the National Front.
Tess Wright, who runs the Walpole Arms in Norfolk and owns two black Labradors, invited the Minister to visit. There’s nothing far right about liking pubs, beer and black Labradors, she said. And I can assure her that all three exist.
Paul Sandford, landlord of the Railway Tavern in Dereham, was more direct. It just shows how out of touch they are, he said, suggesting the Minister spend a day behind the bar.
One can only imagine the Minister’s response to this invitation. I cannot possibly enter your establishment, she might say. The warm ale and the proximity of a Labrador could trigger my far-right detector.
The satirical possibilities are, frankly, endless.
If a black Labrador is far-right, what of the golden retriever? A crypto-fascist. The cocker spaniel? A fellow traveller. The Jack Russell, as one pub landlord noted, is probably the only safe breed, though even that is on thin ice.
If a village pub is a hotbed of extremism, then the entire constituency of Suffolk Coastal, which the Minister represents, is essentially a training camp. Adnams brewery in Southwold, her own seat, is apparently producing radicalising ale. The Bell in Walberswick, which has let dogs in for 600 years, is a known den of insurrection.
And what of the cricket? The Spectator noted that Yoxford plays at Grove Park beside St Peter’s Church and fields girls’ sides at under-11, under-13 and under-15, alongside women’s teams. At Orford, women’s sessions ended with a Pimm’s at close of play. This, apparently, is the reactionary idyll that haunts the Minister’s nights.
One shudders to think what she makes of the Women’s Institute.
The Minister’s subsequent clarification did little to help matters.
Do I think country pubs and black labs are far right? No way hosay! she posted on social media, sharing photographs of her childhood Labrador, Molly, and her current dog, Pepe.
No way hosay.
This is the rhetorical flourish of a woman who has realised, too late, that she has walked into a trap of her own construction. It is the political equivalent of a man who has just insulted his mother-in-law’s cooking and is now frantically insisting that he meant it as a compliment.
She added that rural life isn’t always rosy and that Labour would bring more opportunity for everyone in rural Britain. Hmm. But the damage was done. The image of a Labour minister sneering at the very symbols of the countryside she was appointed to represent had already embedded itself in the national consciousness.
The irony, of course, is that the Minister was trying to make a serious point. She was warning that the far right might weaponise rural nostalgia at the next election. She feared that a romanticised vision of the countryside, the pub, the dog, the hunt, could be used to divide people.
It is a legitimate concern. The countryside has real problems: rural bus cuts, the closure of village shops, the loneliness of isolated communities, a Labour government stuffed full of useless muppets and fraudsters. A politics that reduces the rural to a nostalgic postcard is a politics that ignores the people who actually live there.
But there is a difference between warning about the weaponisation of nostalgia and dismissing the thing itself as a fascist invention.
The pub, the dog, the pint of warm ale, these are not political symbols. They are just things people like. They are the small, ordinary pleasures of a life lived in a particular place. To describe them as a far-right fantasy is not to critique the far right. It is to insult everyone who ever enjoyed them.
And so the Minister remains awake at night, tormented by the vision she cannot escape: a black Labrador, a warm pint, a pub that does exist, and a fox hunt somewhere in the distance.
The horror. The horror.
Where does the Labour Party find these idiots?
Who are the idiots who vote them in?