The government’s plan to remove coal from Britain’s energy mix is regularly set back when weather conditions leave no choice but to start burning coal. On several occasions this year, there has not been enough wind to allow sufficient turbine output, and it is regularly too hot for solar panels to work efficiently.
 
As reported, there has been no change in average UK temperatures for more than two decades; the current 10-year running average temperature is no higher than it was between 1998 and 2007 at 9.4C. The UK climate remains “absolutely benign”, said GWPF director Dr Benny Peiser, adding that it was extraordinary that we are impoverishing our economy and households in a utopian attempt to achieve Net Zero at any cost, while the UK’s long term climate trends “have remained relatively stable”.
 
The government announced in 2021 that Britain was moving towards producing electricity without using coal after October 2024, sooner than the original 2025 deadline. It begs the question: where will providers turn when it is too hot and not windy enough in the future? Turning our backs on coal and fossil fuels before adequate alternative sources of sustainable renewable energy are available is clearly daft.
 
In 2021, the government began shutting down North Sea oil and gas under the North Sea Transition Deal – part of the then Prime Minister’s drive to “Build Back Better.” The off-shore extraction of fossil fuels was to be replaced by off-shore wind energy; wells closed, and jobs moved into green energy. Rough, our biggest natural storage facility, was also more or less shut down and now cannot easily be re-commissioned. To add to the problem, not a single nuclear power plant has been built in the UK since the mid-1990s. By 2030, 14 of 15 nuclear plants are scheduled to have closed with only one replacement, Hinkley Point C, to be commissioned in 2027.
 
We are encouraged to prepare to face a world where everything is powered by electricity and batteries. Clearly the lights will go out, battery operated cars will fail due to a lack of power and charging points. Homes and businesses, including manufacturing and food production will regularly be without power, including light, heat or air conditioning. Public transport and commercial deliveries will grind to a halt, just so we can be seen to have achieved net zero.
 
Shall we rely on imports of food and supplies, power and fuel? Most produced less efficiently than we produce currently and formerly on British soil and sea. There is talk about small nuclear reactors which are clearly the way forward, but very little appears to be happening. Rolls Royce should get cracking with these urgently.
 
Whatever one thinks of them, I believe it is time for the media and ‘social trolls’ to back off Harry, Megan, Prince Andrew and Boris. No one deserves the attacks and vitriol targeted at them, and should a tragedy occur, and one breaks under the strain, what then? None of us is perfect.

During the past week I have reflected on what a richness friends bring to our lives. My farming friends are all heroes, as are those who run local businesses, and the volunteers who worked tirelessly to arrange the Church Fete here on Saturday and open their garden in Ringmer, for Chichester Cathedral.
 
Friends who regularly go the extra mile to support and spend time with friends and family and their local community, are remarkably kind and truly special. They are unsung heroes who make life so much better.
 
Dr Lori Haskell is a clinical psychologist who divides her time between delivering professional training and educational presentations across Canada, and her private practise. She is a nationally recognised expert on trauma and abuse, and trauma related approaches to mental health service delivery. Lori works on projects addressing the impact of trauma on indigenous peoples, developmentally disabled people, and trauma related to homelessness, and restorative justice and gender violence.
 
Professor Melanie Randall held the professorship with the Centre for Research on Violence Against Women and Children, at the University of Western Ontario. Her current teaching and research interests are in the areas of sex discrimination and legal theory. Her publications include issues of women’s autonomy rights, and on sexual violence in women’s lives, including state accountability for responding to and remedying this violence, particularly through law. How topical can you get.
 
On Tuesday Annie Streeter and Jane Cowans, two of my local heroines, who run the Haywards Heath Branch of the NFU, invited members to meet Peter Faulding, a renowned world leader in confined space search rescue and forensic search. Lori and Melanie came as my guests, before returning home to Toronto.
 
Peter has consulted and presented extensively to agencies ranging from UK police forces through to the American FBI. Formed in 1995, he has with his team established a reputation as a world leader in the fields of specialist rescue, underwater search, forensic search, and protester removal, including ‘swampy’.
 
His story, told in his book: What Lies Beneath: My Life as a Forensic Search and Rescue Expert, is extraordinary. His passion and commitment to his work is captivating. His desire to ensure no one, particular children, take part in water activities, without suitable life jackets, is obsessive. As he said, “Seat belts and crash helmets are compulsory, so too should be life jackets”.
 
Peter spends time searching for bodies under water; many would have survived had they worn a life jacket. It is understandable he wishes the law to change.
 
I also invited along well-known local heroine Susan Fleet MBE, founder and managing director of Lea Graham Associates, one of Sussex’s oldest PR companies. Susan has raised over £3.5 million for charity through staging concerts both nationally and internationally over the past 50 years.
 
These are a few I had the privilege to spend time with, I could have mentioned others, but space prohibits. What richness friends bring to our lives.

I recently had a massive clear out of the farm office, a job well overdue. The files and piles of paperwork which had accumulated over several decades, were never a priority until a couple of weeks ago, when due to internal reorganisation, this task became urgent.
 
During the process I came across a pamphlet written in 2005 by my friend Michael Ancram QC. MP, now Lord Lothian. At the time he was MP for Devizes, Labour with Tony Blair as PM, was in government, and it was pre-Brexit.
 
However, Michael’s words are as relevant today as then, despite having a Conservative government since 2010. Granted they did share office with the Lib Dems for the first five years, but his concerns regarding the direction the UK was heading then, are perhaps even more relevant today.
 
Michael began by saying that he believed the vast majority of the British people do not know what a Conservative really is or stands for. He said, “The stark truth is that since Margaret Thatcher the Conservatives as a party have lacked character, coherence and context. There has been no real vision, no real sense of mission, and only a limited understanding of how our country has changed.”
 
Michael was right then, and still today the party needs to re-establish what makes it Conservative. The imperatives being: The defence of our sovereignty. Strengthen individual liberty – not least by pruning back the power of the State. Quality support for those who need it. Putting concern for the environment at the heart of Conservatism. The key words being - Freedom and Fairness, Compassion and Conviction. Boris had the right idea.
 
Finding Michael’s leaflet was opportune as the clarity of his conviction made me understand my current frustration and despair while watching the direction this so called ‘Conservative’ government, which looks increasingly like a Labour government is taking.
 
The title of the pamphlet is ‘I am a Conservative’, and within its 18 pages Michael explains why he is a conservative, what the principles of being a Conservative are and what the philosophy and roots of the Conservative party stand for.
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“At the heart of Conservatism, the driving engine is - Freedom to choose – Freedom to decide – Freedom to live one’s life – Freedom of expression – Freedom from Poverty – Freedom from Fear – Freedom under the Rule of Law.”
 
Today as under Blair, the State is overblown, interfering and hostile to freedom, including free speech. We were promised reduced bureaucracy, deregulation, decentralisation, protection of our civil liberties, a smaller state, and following Brexit, reclaiming our sovereignty.
 
If the Conservatives do not get a grip and return to their core values before the General Election, these values will be buried forever by Labour, the Europhiles, civil servants and left-wing PC elite from all parties, and Boris’s opponents will have won.
 
It will be interesting to see where Boris goes from here. The findings of the ‘kangaroo court’ with its biased chairman who declared at the start said considered Boris guilty, was disgraceful.

Traditional farmers, field sport enthusiasts and those who love rural Britain will be saddened by the recent death of Robin Page. Robin was a proper countryman, a farmer, author, newspaper columnist, passionate campaigner, and a presenter of One Man and His Dog.
 
His message was not always popular, particularly amongst policymakers and planners, particularly his view that country people constitute “the most endangered minority in multicultural Britain”. With statistics showing that 84 per cent of the UK’s population now living in towns and cities, he had a point.
 
As a writer, broadcaster and political agitator, he spent his life campaigning for the preservation of the rural environment. He had no time for those who pontificate from their offices and armchairs; he lived and breathed the lifestyle he championed; milking, shearing and mucking out in the traditional way, on his smallholding in the Cambridgeshire village where he was born.
 
In 1993 he founded the Countyside Restoration Trust with the artist Gordon Beningfield, and the conservationist Sir Laurens van de Post, a mentor to King Charles, and godfather to Prince William, as a founding patron.
 
The King became a longstanding supporter and visited Lark Rise Farm. He regularly consulted Robin on environmental matters, and invited him and his wife Lulu, to stay at balmoral.
 
In 2002 Robin was arrested on suspicion of inciting racial hatred for a speech in Gloucestershire which began with the words: “If you are a black, vegetarian, Muslim, asylum-seeking, one-legged lesbian lorry driver, I want the same rights as you.” He was released without charge, and six years later paid compensation for his wrongful detention.
 
Robin was a fervent opponent of the European Union, which he blamed for “destroying our agriculture, fisheries, legal system, borders and industries”. He was certainly not wrong about that.
 
For 30 years he wrote the Country Diary column in The Daily Telegraph. Three times he was sacked over various controversies and twice reinstated due to popular demand from the paper’s readers. However, his dismissal in 2016 – notified by an out-of-office-hours email, was final. He wrote on his blog, “I have been restructured out of the paper by corporate, urban money men.”
 
For six years Robin presented One Man and His Dog, the BBC series about sheepdog trials. At its peak, the show attracted an audience of eight million, but controversially he was sacked in 1999 for taking part in the Countryside Alliance protest marches.
 
Robin’s views and the outspokenness with which he expressed them, often led him into trouble. Many of his opinions were politically incorrect and of course he had no time for the “woke” brigade. These qualities along with his passion for the countryside, nature, and the fast-declining traditional British rural way of life, which he loved so deeply, are what endeared him to those of us who knew him, and his many fans. Robin was one of a kind, he will be sorely missed.