In the year 2001 Toby Young asked me to help him boost The Spectator’s new online edition by writing a column he christened Wild Life, in which ‘a great white hunter takes aim at a few sacred cows in contemporary Africa’.

What he really wanted was scoops. My story on Prince William shooting an ibis (a protected bird in Kenya) was splashed across the UK dailies, as was my exclusive on Rowan Atkinson having to seize the controls of an aircraft flying him and his family over the African bush after the hungover pilot fell unconscious. Around this time, my ex-wife and I pitched a tent in a remote corner of the Laikipia plateau, north of Mount Kenya, where we began ranching cattle. The editor Boris Johnson liked my farming tales and moved me into the magazine. For 25 years I think it has been the only regular column out of Africa in any western publication.

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Life in Africa’s wilderness was often strange, beautiful or violent, but writing this column brought me back to earth every 30 days, when........

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