Why do Conservatives keep talking about ending the ban on hunting?

They cannot help themselves. Jeremy Hunt was asked a harmless question about his view on fox hunting, by Christopher Hope, the chief political correspondent of The Telegraph. Instead of saying that his priority in No 10 would be, as an entrepreneur, delivering Brexit, he answered it.

He pointed out that there is no majority in the House of Commons for changing the law. He could even have stopped there, and moved on to another subject. But no, he went on to speculate about what might happen after the next election: “I would as soon as there was a majority in parliament that would be likely to repeal the fox hunting ban, then I would support a vote in parliament.”

There was still one last chance to pull back. Allowing a free vote in the Commons has been the official party fudge for some time. But he went further. Possibly thinking “tally ho” to himself, he said how he would vote: “I would vote to repeal the ban on fox hunting. It is part of the countryside. And we have to recognise that in terms of the balance of the countryside. You know, it’s part of our heritage.”

Presumably he made a quick calculation, speaking to the newspaper of the Tory faithful, that he needed the votes of the caricature of Telegraph-reading Conservative Party members.

If so, he soon realised he had miscalculated. Many Tory members regret the hunting ban and would like to reverse it, but many others support the ban. And there is a third group who think the whole debate is rather silly but that the party cannot afford to appear to be out of touch with public opinion.

One anonymous Tory MP was quoted yesterday as saying they had switched their vote to Boris Johnson as a result of Hunt’s opportunism. Hunting is one of those subjects on which the opinion-poll evidence is overwhelming. A YouGov snap poll has found 81 per cent thought it should remain illegal, while only 11 per cent thought the ban should be lifted.

By this morning Hunt was in full reverse-ferret mode on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. He said he did not believe there would “ever” be a majority among MPs for overturning the ban, and that he had simply been “restating the position in our manifesto from 2017”.

In other words, he was only making the same mistake as Theresa May in the 2017 election campaign, when, caught unawares, she restated the position in the 2015 manifesto.

Hunting is important for a small minority of the population – mostly not for itself but as a symbol of the metropolitan elite’s ignorance of “the countryside”. But for a large majority it is a straightforward question of animal welfare.

I find this puzzling, as factory farming seems a more important source of animal cruelty, but any Conservative politician ought to know that hunting is an issue in which there are no votes for them either way – whether in an internal party election or a general election.

All Tory candidates for any office should train themselves to respond to any question about hunting by saying the law won’t change, and then changing the subject.