The Shooting Party

It may, or possibly may not, interest you to hear about my experience backing Zac in his London mayoral campaign and I had intended to kick off by saying that I’d never done anything like this before, until I remembered…

In the autumn of 1972 there was an election in Germany, just West Germany then of course, and I was an unlikely canvasser. My candidate was standing for the CDU, the Christian Democratic Union of Germany, a party that seemed then and is still, pretty much the same as the UK Conservative and Unionist (you unionists are not forgotten, at least here) Party. My task was to drive him around in his whopping Merc. At backgammon I often take chances and if they don’t come off it’s not the end of the world. But even aged eighteen I was reluctant to take this chance to prang the candidate’s car. He was unaware that my driving test had been taken in Dundalk in a Morris Minor and more or less said that I was (I still am) a wimp.

So I was relegated to delivering leaflets and was often the subject of verbal abuse from his electorate. I was Sterling Moss as a driver compared to my mastery of German, so it didn’t bother me. In the event, Willy Brandt won the federal election for his SDP party but the CDU, as you know, were not consigned to the wilderness; Angela Merkel is their admirable leader.

As we have been looking at the bird population of Barons Court recently (and I’m excited to have been asked to join a bird count) I thought it might interest you to read the depletion count at the shoot I was at all those years ago in Germany. It was a splendid occasion and I wish I had pictures but they only remain in my mind. Imagine a shoot in Victorian England: liveried foresters, a horse-drawn game cart, luncheon served by staff in a woodland glade, the game laid out in the evening on the terrace in front of the guns, by now in black tie, while the foresters blew their French (?) horns in the torchlight. Well that was it.

And what did Young Gun Christopher pot? Bugger all, as I was consigned to be a beater. However, three years earlier I had demonstrated my prowess.

It was my personal best, overtaking my sitting pigeon. In those days I had much in common with Pearson, a butler in a house in Buckinghamshire, who confided “some like to shoot ’em flying but I like to take ’em on the ground”.

I will tell you about Zak’s campaign another day, if there’s anything of interest to report.