The start of the grouse-shooting season on 12th August – the Glorious Twelfth of Victorian hagiography – is an important fixture in the malcontents’ calendar.
It slots in with May Day (aka International Workers’ Day), various woke ‘awareness days’, party conferences and foxhunting’s Boxing Day meets. Like the last category, it is an anti-celebration, an annual hate-fest and an opportunity to further the long march of the left through the countryside.
The idea of ‘culture wars’ as a proxy for the ancient struggle between