Swept through West Country
Major Belinda Forsythe and her contingent of trainee military police were anything but what the doctor ordered. Rumour had it that, as they arrived at disease control HQ at Clyst Hydon, they were booed by the veterinary staff.
“Whether that is true or not, they certainly did very little to improve the situation. Their role was to ‘oversee’ the logistical operation of slaughter, incineration and disinfection. They weren’t required to get their hands dirty themselves, merely to sit in judgement on what MAFF’s exhausted vets were up to. Worse still, their presence served to complicate rather than simplify the casehandling process.”
The crisis rolled on, with the countryside closed tourism leaders – as today with coronavirus lockdown – began to despair as visitors were effectively barred from much of the countryside and the stench of burning cattle and sheep hung in the air near the pyres.
By late March Prime Minister Blair decided he needed to get directly involved in the battle against FMD. Anthony met him at the Ministry of Agriculture HQ in Exeter.
He said Blair was in a listening mood. “‘What can we do to help?’ he asked. I said that the main thing was to provide a military dimension which could actually make a difference by getting stuck into the grim work on-farm. And acting quickly was vital to minimising the risk of spread from an outbreak. The standard procedure was for the MAFF vet on the ground to ring a specialist at HQ in London, describe the symptoms and seek confirmation. But with cases multiplying across the country, there were reports of this process having taken over 12 hours.
“‘Why can’t you trust the vet on the farm to make the diagnosis?’ I asked. Blair turned to Alastair Campbell (his press secretary). ‘Can we do that?’ he asked. The great man nodded his approval. ‘OK then, we’ll do that, and I’ll see what we can do about the army as well.’ There was a scrum of reporters, photographers and cameramen to be fought through as we emerged from what was no more than a half hour meeting. ‘More satellite dishes in that car park than at Jodrell Bank,’ I noted.
“I then gave probably half a dozen interviews, saying that the Prime Minister had listened to what we’d had to say and seemed genuinely concerned.”
Eventually, following the loss of thousands of animals and the start of warmer weather, which bears down on the virus, the disease began to abate but the scars ran deep and are still felt in the livestock rearing parts of the West Country to this day.
Anthony Gibson’s autobiography: West Countryman – a Life in Farming, Countryside, Cricket and Cider is published by Charlcombe Books price £20.
IN early April, when I stopped for diesel on my way back to the office after lunchtime television duties, I spotted a headline in that day’s Daily Mirror: ‘Phoenix, the calf that came back from the dead,’ it read, over a photograph of a doe-eyed, pure white calf.
I quickly deduced that the calf was a survivor from the Membury disaster, in which cattle and sheep from no fewer than 15 holdings had gone up in smoke. ‘Phoenix’, as it had inevitably been dubbed, had somehow survived.
I rang Tim Render [the man from the Ministry of Agriculture in charge of the cull] to warn him of what was afoot.
“If you lot insist that that calf has to be slaughtered you’ll be crucified,” I told him.
He seemed unconcerned. “Oh well, we’ll just have to leave it up to the vets,” was his reply. “Rules are rules.”
Entirely predictably the vets insisted that an exception could not be made for a single calf, no matter how beguiling it might appear or iconic it might have become. And the media balloon duly went up. It wasn’t until Alastair Campbell [Tony Blair’s press secretary] became involved that a reprieve was granted. I would love to have known what he’d said when news of this entirely gratuitous cock-up reached him.