Badger bungling is not a gas for O-Patz

It’s a sign of how quiet politics has been that Westminster has started discussing the hoary old chestnut of fox hunting in the last week.

Presumably the Tories, or their backbenchers, think reintroducing hunting with hounds will disprove the Labour claim that they’re out of touch.

The issue is unlikely to find much traction with the Tory leadership if only because most of them were schooled at the sort of establishments that teach warcraft as a matter of course. And lesson one is never try to fight a battle on two fronts.

The government has already opened up one front in the war on woodland creatures, and they are losing to the badgers. Never mind The Art Of War, they should’ve read The Wind In The Willows. And the entire episode could yet become required reading in a different sort of course how not to implement a policy.

For Environment Secretary Owen Paterson it’s turning into his personal Vietnam. He’s accused of “badgicide” and turning to increasingly vicious methods in an attempt to finish the thing. The only thing in Mr Paterson’s favour is that the equivalent of “Hanoi” Jane Fonda in this scenario is Queen guitarist Brian May, presumably drawn to the cause by his close resemblance to the creatures he seeks to protect like some sort of big badger superhero.

The badger issue intruded on Prime Minister’s Questions last week when Ed Miliband mocked the Government for considering cutting eco levies as a way to lower energy bills as opposed to Miliband’s mooted price freeze when they once promised to be the greenest government ever. Cameron even went to the Arctic to show off his environmental credentials.

Miliband jeered: “In five short years he’s gone from hug a husky to gas a badger.”

The prospect of gassing badgers was Owen Paterson’s response to the news that so far the badger culls in south-west England have failed to hit their target, literally. Last year the cull was called off at the last minute because apparently there were too many badgers Mr Brock had bred his way to safety. This year there aren’t enough badgers. Marksmen shot only around half the expected numbers in Somerset and even fewer in Gloucestershire.

A former ministerial colleague of Paterson (nicknamed O-Patz in a nod to the R-Patz moniker given to Twilight heart-throb Robert Pattinson and still way out in front in an ongoing online poll on the sexiest MP) once told me the Secretary of State would really rather be leading the cull from the front with rifle in hand. Given the figures that might not be such a bad idea.

Last week Paterson petulantly accused the badgers of “moving the goalposts”, which was funny. Less amusing is the stark fact that hundreds of the creatures have been shot for no reason, since not enough will have been killed to have an impact on the spread of TB in cows.

For all that it sometimes seems that Paterson is driven by a desire to decimate the badger population, the point of the cull is to curb bovine TB.

But opponents would prefer to see them vaccinated. Morecombe MP David Morris led a debate last week calling for just that.

Morris is best known for once introducing a backbench bill so ludicrous that he had to endure the humiliation of seeing it voted down. Usually such bills are nodded through on the understanding there won’t be time for them to go any further.

Morris’s proposal to license hairdressers provoked the Labour benches into not just opposing it but forcing a division, which Morris comprehensively lost.

In his debate Morris compared the badger jab to the BCG everyone gets at school and described a volunteer-led programme to inoculate the creatures as potentially “the magic wand that enables us to deliver a vaccination programme”.

He must have attended Harry Potter’s Hogwarts school if he got his BCG via magic wand.

How O-Patz must wish he could cast a spell to make the problem disappear.