I heard two good things on Farming Today, today – this is the first.
When I turned on I’d just missed the beginning of the programme and there was some bloke talking about marine fisheries. I didn’t recognise him but he seemed pretty fired up, spoke very well and as he talked I thought ‘I wonder who this guy is. He seems to know his stuff’. Only at the end of the item did I learn that this was Luke Pollard MP, the Shadow SoS for DEFRA.
Mr Pollard is an unknown quantity to me; I’ve never met him, I wouldn’t recognise him in the street, I don’t recognise his voice and I don’t know much about him, so I was a bit surprised, and delighted, to discover this morning that at least for a few minutes he demonstrated star quality.
Now let’s not get too excited because the chances of Mr Pollard being the next DEFRA Secretary are very low: for one thing, we’ll probably see several more hopeless Tories before the next general election, and Shadow Cabinet members haven’t had a great longevity in recent years, but as a Labour member I am still thrilled each time I hear a Labour politician making sense on the environment. And Mr Pollard was very good this morning.
So that was a good way to start the day, and then…
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I do think Sir Keir Starmmer is bring a lot of good sense to the Labour Party. He seems to have gathered a good team around him. This team, already and in time will contrast starkly and put to shame, the hopeless Tories who are so closely allied to the shooters of our wild life for fun.