‘We must never hide anything,’ declared the director of the British Museum, Hartwig Fischer, three years ago, when criticised for disrespecting its greatest founding genius, Sir Hans Sloane, because, through marriage, he had profited from slave labour. Sloane’s Rysbrack bust was now to be presented, he said, ‘in the exploitative context of the British Empire’. So it would take a heart of stone not to laugh now that Dr Fischer has been forced to resign for failing to raise the alarm – even with his chairman, George Osborne – that hundreds of objects have disappeared from the museum’s collections through a long-standing inside job. He disparaged the exterior expert who had warned him of the thefts. After the death of George Floyd in 2020, Dr Fischer suddenly announced that the BM was ‘aligned with the spirit and soul of Black Lives Matter’. With Dr Fischer’s departure, one hopes a spirit-and-soul realignment can take place, in favour of the museum’s core purpose and proper practices. It is not easy, however, to remedy the theft problem. ‘De-accession’ rules which prevent the sale of almost all objects accepted are necessary, but they do land the BM with literally millions of what German collections call zweite garnitur. Sloane’s collection alone amounts to nearly 100,000 objects. Proper cataloguing is a most meticulous business (look up, for example, the marvellous BM online inventory of its two million prints and numerous drawings). It would probably cost too much time and money to do every object. The system therefore depends on trust. Whoever did this over so many years is the museum world’s equivalent of Kim Philby – not a petty thief, but a great traitor.

‘Is there anything we can do about Rod Liddle?’ the anxious gathering wanted to know. I imagine the question is frequently asked when feminists, professional ‘anti-racists’ or libel readers convene, but this was a very different company – an all-white, almost all-male gathering of sporting enthusiasts, assembled, just beneath a moor, for a large breakfast. The question arose because of a recent Sunday Times column by Rod on grouse-shooting, whose headline spoke of ‘murdering’ red kites for ‘spivs’. My answer to it was negative, Rod being incorrigible. But afterwards I felt I had been over-influenced by two factors. The first was that we columnists need to stick together to defend our increasingly threatened freedom to talk utter rubbish. The second was my residual guilt at having got Rod sacked as editor of the BBC Today programme many years ago. As the then editor of the Daily Telegraph, I had written a leader complaining that a savage Guardian attack by Rod on the Countryside Alliance was a flagrant breach of BBC impartiality rules, for which he should be dismissed. To my amazement, the BBC complied. My momentary triumph turned to dismay when I realised that the Corporation had seized on my protest as a pretext. They had already wanted rid of Rod because he was perilously brave and original. I had unwittingly played their game. I gave Rod lunch in White’s by way of apology, but I am not sure it worked.

So, as I say, I was over-cautious in my answer to my fellow guns. After all, I now reason, Rod’s sacking was the making of him. He had clearly been unhappy in the narrow corridors and narrower mindset of Broadcasting House. My bungling intervention gave him the chance to become rich and famous, free and fulfilled. Why should the problem of Rod and the red grouse not be tackled? One could take Rod’s column to Ipso, the distinguished press regulator, under Clause 1 (Accuracy). He is provably inaccurate to say that the word ‘vermin’ – an official term which identifies bird and animal species that, unlike game, may be shot all year round – includes ‘all our magnificent birds of prey (including kites)’, mountain hares, badgers and pine martens. All of the above are not vermin, but protected species. Again, no one who has heard a curlew could describe its cry as ‘hooting’, nor could anyone who has seen grouse shot write of ‘birds that fly as if they’ve just eaten a full English breakfast after a heavy night on the piss’. The red grouse is on average the fastest of all British game birds. Rod could be invited to prove to Ipso his claim that, when a red kite was found last October hanging dead in a tree after being poisoned and shot, ‘It was gamekeepers to blame beyond reasonable doubt’, i.e. at the level required for criminal conviction. There is no known evidence about the culprit, and no good reason why a gamekeeper would have been tempted, since red kites do not kill grouse. Rod unkindly refers to grouse, which are notable for the beauty of their flight, as ‘flapping, panicking idiots’. Are we dealing here with another species – the Rod grouse – a product of the columnist’s lurid imagination?

But no, quasi-judicial means – though fully justified when one considers that some poor Sunday Times readers may believe Rod’s claims – would be unfraternal in me, a fellow scribbler. Instead, I appeal to Rod Liddle’s patriotism. No one is stronger than he in defending our indigenous inhabitants, especially our northern ones, against the encroachment of immigration. He should be aware that the red grouse is (with a nod to the Scottish crossbill) the sole wild bird native to the British Isles alone and should consequently rejoice that its numbers thrive because of its conservation as game. Without that habitat, this uniquely British bird would disappear because of alien predation. 

After our worried breakfast, we went up into Rod’s ‘scorched, treeless moonscape’ of the moors. It was covered with lovely purple heather, and the windless bits hummed with insects. We saw snipe, buzzards, a red kite, a golden eagle and blackcock. As I entered the butt, amid ‘the barren, charred expanse of grouseland’ (© R. Liddle) so miserably depleted of nature, I found an adder sunning itself on the stones.