Will’s World: Baleful effort from No 10 could be last straw
© Richard Stanton “If you can keep yourself from growing sour, surly, bitter and cynical, man you’ve got it half licked,” wrote Henry Miller in his seminal 1972 book On Turning Eighty.
I think about this a lot, as it’s difficult, as you get older, not to become cynical. You’ve seen it all before, modern life is a bit rubbish, and everything was better in the good old days, right?
Maybe, maybe not. But even if elements of that are true, I’m conscious that it is still a very negative mindset to get into, and I’m fighting hard to resist it.
See also: Farmers Weekly Podcast Ep 157: Was Farm to Fork summit just a PR stunt?
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But no matter how much I strive to keep an open mind, there are occasions when I just can’t help falling into the trap – and these moments invariably seem to involve the Westminster government.
In my defence, though, over the past decade there can’t be many sectors of society that have been more royally shafted by the current administration than farmers.
Also I’m tired, my knees are aching and my children are playing some hideous noise that I can only assume is modern music, so you’ll just have to forgive me.
Are you sitting comfortably?
It began when I was on the tractor this morning, cheerfully listening to Farming Today’s coverage of the recent Number 10 Food Summit (or, to give it its pretentiously middle-class name, The Farm to Fork Summit).
The always excellent Anna Hill was just taking us into the Downing Street garden and pointing out the great and good of the various invited guests, when she casually mentioned that straw bales had been brought in for the guests to sit on.
It was at this point that I lost it. I mean, come on! Straw bales? What chance do I have here? Because we all know that farmers don’t sit on chairs, right?
We insist that if we absolutely must sit down, it’s a straw bale or nothing. At a push we’ll lean on a five-bar gate, but sit on an actual chair or bench? No, thank you.
I’m desperate to know which hapless clown came up with this idea, and what else was brainstormed in that meeting.
Sunak: “Yah, yah, we’ve got the farmers coming round next week; what do they like?”
Staffer 1: “Well, we’ll need straw bales, of course.”
Sunak: “Goes without saying. What else?”
Staffer 2: “Sausages on a barbecue and Kaleb Cooper off the TV?”
Sunak: “Excellent, we’ll have the entire food system sorted by the end of the day.”
Kaleb Cooper and Rishi Sunak at the Food Summit © Simon Dawson/No 10 Downing Street
Party pieces
I only wish, for comedy reasons, this had happened during one of the last two incumbents’ reigns, given their penchants for dressing up and role-playing.
Picture Johnson swaggering about the garden (remember how much he loved a party there?) in a Schoffel covered in dog hair, dealer boots and a pair of those dual-coloured shorts that all the young farmers are wearing these days.
Or Truss tearing around the lawn on a 300hp tractor with a mobile clamped to her ear, running over the cat and knocking the back wall down (remember how much she loved crashing things?).
I expect they would have booked The Wurzels for entertainment too, given everyone knows how farmers steadfastly refuse to listen to anyone else. Opportunity missed there, Rishi.
Still, much like Back British Farming Day, when various MPs pin a wheatsheaf to their lapels in the House of Commons and tell us all how much they love farmers, and how important we are to the nation, they’ve got their photo opportunity and have been seen to be doing something.
Cynic, realist, or just grumpy old bugger? I’ll let you decide.