Jenny Riddell-Carpenter, Labour’s minister for nature and rural affairs, has been losing sleep. Not over village shops, bus routes, or the next farm that will not survive the inheritance-tax row. She lies awake because somebody, at the next election, might offer the country a picture of itself that includes warm ale, a black Labrador and a pub.

Speaking at a fringe meeting at Labour’s party conference in Liverpool, she called that picture “a nostalgic vision of Britain that never really existed…a very far-right nostalgic vision of Britain that we don’t want to have.” In this telling, the pub “doesn’t exist.” The dog is a prop. The pint is a dog-whistle. Hunting comes in with them, not as a trade or a quarrel about land, but as scenery; the one rural fact her party already knows how to hang on the wall and condemn.

Tuesday night, a village pub in Oxfordshire. It is three hundred years old and still standing: solid, warm, a refuge. Home from home. Solitude or company, darts or a book, jokes at the bar or a quiet table for two. The restaurant is closed. Since my wife, who normally runs a bingo, is unwell, it is very quiet, painfully so. Several regulars are throwing darts in the sports bar. A few couples in the saloon watch the fire and talk, that murmur you only get in a country inn when no piped music is........

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