Pack him off with the really wild folk and Packham will see sense

Charles Clover 13 September 2015

I am fascinated by the cult of the BBC wildlife presenter Chris Packham, for he has an

attraction for some that I struggle to grasp. He certainly brings something new to the job

of talking about lapwings and otters: a sharp haircut, a way of weaving the lyrics of pop

songs into his scripts and maybe, yes, a bit of Hollywood preening, as you will see in his

latest eight-part series, in which he wears Wayfarers and drives around in a 1960s

convertible.

All this is vaguely stylish, and I can see why a few years ago the BBC chiefs in the boring

old Natural History Unit in Bristol chose to puff up this edgy presenter and give him Bill

Oddie’s slot on Springwatch a few years ago. So Packham and the equally irritating

Michaela Strachan get to present the whole panoply of 100 outside broadcast cameras

filming British wildlife in ways that you have never seen it before, and the ratings soar.

Then it goes to Packham’s head. He starts saying things that don’t get through the filter of

truth, fairness and rationality. I am thinking of Packham’s description on social media of

the farmers involved in the pilot badger cull to tackle bovine TB as “brutalist thugs, liars

and frauds”. Remember, these people were isolated and facing intimidation as well as

volatile milk prices at the time.

The BBC duly rebuked him for “intemperate” language, but this didn’t quite grasp the

problem. Imagine the outcry if Jeremy Bowen, the BBC’s Middle East editor, were to write

an abusive article accusing the Israelis — or the Palestinians — of being brutalist thugs

and liars. If Jim Naughtie, the Scottish presenter of Radio 4’s Today programme, were to

make a chippy tweet in favour of Scottish independence his job would probably not last the

day.

Yet in the celebrity factory of natural history broadcasting, taking sides on impulse is fine

and it is just abusive language we have to deal with. The BBC seems not to get it: nature

can be as political as any other issue. Packham has ignited controversy again in his column

for this month’s BBC Wildlife magazine.

He says he is just sticking up for wildlife. He accuses conservation charities such as the

RSPB and the Wildlife Trusts of failing to stand up and be counted when he and others

opposed a change in the law on hunting in the summer. This change, requested by Welsh

sheep farmers, would have harmonised what happens in England and Wales with what

happens in Scotland, by allowing more dogs to be used to flush foxes to guns. Packham

calls this modest adjustment “a return to the barbarism of foxhunting”.

The self-appointed defender of wildlife goes on to accuse conservation bodies of failing to

oppose the badger culls — implemented by a democratically elected government on

scientific advice to tackle the reservoir of disease. He rages about the illegal persecution of

the hen harrier and moans that charities will not back a ban on driven grouse shooting in

retaliation for it because they are in collaboration with the “nasty brigade”, as he calls

traditional landowners.

At that point Tim Bonner, the new chief executive of the Countryside Alliance, a defender

of country sports, complained to the BBC Trust. A Guardian columnist hit back, suggesting

that we should treasure Packham for speaking his mind, which shows how political he is.

I am all for Packham saying anything he likes in any forum that will print or air it — as long

as it is not funded by the taxpayer. The issue is whether people should use the privileged

position they have been given by a national broadcaster as a platform to campaign for their

own beliefs, particularly when those beliefs would ultimately abolish the livelihoods of, say,

gamekeepers and sheep farmers.

The problem with Packham’s argument anyway is that it confuses conservation with animal

rights — and in so doing makes a classic mistake. He moans about conservation

organisations’ failure to protect the red fox and the badger when these two species are

near to perfectly conserved. No issue. The reality is that creatures without predators need

to be managed, even by wildlife organisations.

I love wildlife. But I am not a “wildlife lover” in the cuddly, cutesy way that Packham and

his Twitter followers mean it, for that has become code for a political point of view, a heady

and ill-thought-out mixture of class war, animal rights and land reform. That is why there is

substance in the Countryside Alliance’s complaint.

The solution to Packham is not to sack him. It is to do what an editor does when a reporter

gets too close to the story — send him out to spend more time with people with opposing

views: wildfowlers, Welsh hill farmers, even gamekeepers. Making them talk to reasonable

people and listen to them, away from the sycophants in the office and on Twitter: that is

the way to stop the celebrity becoming a monster.