This was treason. The royal party and the lords - aided by a bit of feudal muscle from their hunt servants - were usurping the people's democracy. Where was Black Rod, hired to keep the monarch's party out of the Commons? Despite a Labour government committed to ban hunting backed by the public, Prince Charles has made the gesture of taking his young sons out hunting in defiance of the polls. Here were the princes' friends, invading the Commons. The heir to throne has the political tact of his namesake, Charles I.
I could fill this column with the extraordinary things printed in the Daily Telegraph yesterday - Boris Johnson, Bill Deedes, Charles Moore at full gallop. How pleasurable was the shock of the ruling classes finding the police not forelock-tugging to them for once: "I do not have a high opinion of our dear police," said a shocked "respectable country solicitor", according to Moore out there in the melee where he found "shaven heads, tattoos and rough tongues" mixed with marquesses. His reportage described the gallant countryside forces as if they were Henry V's archers and aristocrats at Agincourt. Except they lost the day yesterday: hunting was banned. "In the crowd's mood one felt the makings of a national tragedy," Moore concluded theatrically.
What exactly is their tragedy? Since hunting is atavistic and elemental, it's not surprising it brings out primal politics on both sides. What, the Telegraph writers kept asking, turned "good, law-abiding people" into rioters assaulting the police? What made them so extraordinarily angry?
That's easy. Their rage is a last hurrah for a lost world. This feels to them like the death throes of old England. These are the dispossessed, incoherent with fury at all that they have lost. A way of life is at threat, they keep saying. They mean it and they feel it passionately. The country party believes it is the authentic yeomanry, the embodiment of all English history, symbols of Englishness itself, keepers of the countryside that is the soul of our green and pleasant land. Their anguish comes from blind incomprehension at why and how they lost the power and influence that once was their birthright.
Baying outside the barriers, they blow their impotent little hunting horns at an alien Labour government, firmly set to stay indefinitely. Here for the first time is a powerful, legitimate, effective Labour government such as there has never been. All other Labour governments in the last Tory century were accidental squatters, always teetering on the edge of disasters that would soon unseat them from their brief perch. Now the hunters' own old Tory party has withered into a useless rump of sub-Thatcherite suburban "garagistes", people whom these countrysiders barely recognise as their own kind. The Telegraph, the journal of countryside grandeeism and its wannabes, turns out to have been a cynical shell, the plaything of a posturing villain accused of the grossest fraud. The countrysiders cannot and will not reconcile themselves to their new place on the far margins of national consciousness in a profoundly urban culture.
These landowners have not lost money - far from it - but they can't understand why it no longer buys enough influence. Three-quarters of farmers own their own land - and their land values have more than tripled in the last 10 years. (It's another story for the wretched 30% tenant farmers.) Of the small minority of citizens who live in the country, only 2% have any employment linked with the land. The majority of country-dwellers these days are dormitory denizens, not Countryside Alliance types: that's why polls show rural residents as opposed to hunting as city folk. Yet the country party's expectation is still that wide acres should mean great power. Well-off, well-organised and genuinely outraged, they can field huge demonstrations and persuade themselves that their tiny numbers still wield political clout.
What they lack in numbers, they make up for in the depth of their loathing for the New Labour townies. With feudal hauteur they saw nobility in the horny-handed old socialist miners and dockers of yore, but their contempt for the modern managerial middle classes of New Labour knows no bounds. They have never met these types - the ordinarily educated products of the upper echelons of comprehensives, all those teachers, social workers and technocrats they see as interfering do-gooders. This is indeed class war - the last stand of the usurped upper class and their imitators.
Sadly, this preposterous waste of political energy will drag on and on, because this time their indignation is justified. Although they rail in vain against their waning power, they have every right to feel aggrieved at this assault on their relatively harmless if distasteful pleasures. So hounds will be publicly massacred, the police will be mocked and the law openly defied.
The whole debate is a sign of politically decadent times. The left should wonder why they are unable to summon up a fraction of that anger about the things that really matter. Where is the same fury about social injustice in this most unequal nation in Europe? The left never stormed the Lords to throw out the hereditaries and demand democracy. Instead, it's the hunters, misogynous fathers and fuel protesters of the right who rattle the cage.
The countrysiders in the Lords will oppose the hunting bill again, but others will oppose it for good liberal reasons - proving the need for a second chamber. Liberals should always be wary of banning people from doing as they like. There needs to be an overwhelming case for the serious harm done: hunting just doesn't meet that criteria (killing a few foxes is not more cruel than battery farming). Poking rich landowners into class warfare may be satisfying, but it is not a good enough reason to stop them doing something they passionately want to do.
The Parliament Act was first used by Lloyd George in 1911 for real class war. He bulldozed through brave new taxes in the most radical budgets to start up the welfare state. He forced through pensions, sick pay and national assistance for the destitute against the strongly armed self-interests of the rich. That should be a sobering reminder for New Labour, which has often elevated cowardice to a political ideology.
The Parliament Act now might be used for similar historic acts - for imposing land taxes to capture the vast untaxed wealth of soaring property values or for windfalling the City fat cats' obscene greed. Instead history will record years of discord over a rural absurdity that will make us the laughing stock of the world. What was Labour's enduring battle? Not taxes but foxes.
