The Defra minister responsible for rural communities has decided that the country pub with a black Labrador under the table is a far-right fantasy that never existed.
Jenny Riddell-Carpenter told a fringe meeting at Labour conference that she lies awake fearing a vision of warm ale, a black Lab at your feet in a pub that doesn't exist, and fox-hunting symbolism all around. Rural communities are on her ministerial job description. So are protected landscapes and access to nature. She is, by appointment, in charge of the thing she says was never there.
The countryside answered within the week. A pub in Cotton, down the road from her own constituency, put up a sign offering a free warm pint with every black Labrador on Sunday. The landlord's own black Labrador is called Philip. Philip has not commented.
Then Jeremy Clarkson walked onto the stage at the Conservative conference in Birmingham and confessed that he must be a socialist, since he drinks lager and his Labradors are fox red.
Laugh, by all means. The minister's real mistake is a bigger one, because the dog was never set dressing.
The Labrador is a working retriever, bred on British estates in the 1800s to fetch shot game. Warm ale is cask beer, and cask beer is malted barley off a British field. The pub at the end of the village is where the mart crowd went after the sale and argued about the price of store lambs until closing. Every item in her nightmare is a piece of farm equipment.
And the pub that doesn't exist has an address. Clarkson opened it in Asthall in 2024, sells nothing that wasn't grown or reared in Britain, and named it after the animal she finds so sinister.
It is called the Farmer's Dog.