It’s as good an indicator as you’ll find of this government’s asinine attitude to rural Britain that you’re reading a piece in which a Spectator writer semi-seriously considers the far-right credentials of various dog breeds. How right-wing is your dog? in itself sounds like one of Alan Partridge’s increasingly desperate pitches for a new TV show.   

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Is it still possible to be a Jewish Green party supporter?

I’ll do anything to keep Zack Polanski out of Kentish Town

Pity the poor black Lab, for it’s these harmless thickos of the dog world that have aroused Labour’s ire. You’ll no doubt be aware that earlier this week, Jenny Riddell-Carpenter, the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Nature, told a fringe meeting at the Labour party conference that the far-right at the next election would weaponise a nostalgic vision of Britain ‘that we don’t want to have [and] never really existed’.  

This dystopia, she told her audience, would involve ‘warm ale, a black Labrador by your feet in a pub that doesn’t exist, and with symbolism of fox hunting all around them’.  Riddell-Carpenter has since attempted to row back, by posting photos of her childhood yellow Labrador, which only serves to expose her as the equivalent of a self-hating Jew. She has also put pictures of her current dog online; a miniature Schnauzer – to which the only possible response is silence.

There is, as they say, a lot to unpick here. Warm ale and pubs were often evoked by that famously non-right-wing writer, George Orwell, in his evocations of the English character. So where does........

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