The real voice of hunting

Nick Morrison meets the public face of the militant pro-hunt movement.

THERE'S an embossed fox on the brick gatepost as you pull into the drive. A silver fox adorns the maroon Range Rover parked on the gravel outside the converted farmhouse. The welcome plaque by the door depicts a fox pursued by huntsman and hounds. You don't have to be Loyd Grossman to work out who lives in a house like this.

But Edward Duke doesn't seem like the archetypal toff who enjoys donning a scarlet coat and quaffing from a stirrup cup. It's not just that he greets me wearing tracksuit trousers and a sweatshirt, but he has the solid credentials of a self-made man.

After a childhood spent in Sunderland and Bishop Auckland, where he says he was "the original raggy-arsed kid", he went to work for a mining company in Newton Aycliffe, before setting up his own business. Another business soon followed, making railway trucks for the mining industry. He sold up in 1984, just before the miners' strike took the bottom out of the market.

He then developed a reputation as a company doctor - called in by banks to help save businesses on the brink of bankruptcy, so they can then be sold as going concerns. He's made his living doing this since he was 32 - he's 57 now - but also owns a couple of firms, taken in exchange for payment for his services, making ceramics, including bottles for special editions of malt whisky.

He was introduced to hunting by his second wife Penny - with whom he has three of his four children - when she bought him a horse for his 40th birthday. His first hunt had him hooked, and he is a regular with the Middleton Hunt in North Yorkshire.

It's while he's showing me some of the whisky bottles, in the dining room of his home near Easingwold, that my eyes are drawn to a rolled up banner on the floor, with a swastika in one corner. Spotting my raised eyebrow, he unfurls it to reveal a swastika at both ends of the legend: 'I was the last person to ban hunting and you know what I did for freedom'.

Some people would say that was quite provocative, I venture. "Good. That is the plan," he says.

Mr Duke is the public face - and financial backer - of the Real CA, a shadowy network bringing together those who are prepared to test the boundaries of the law to protect hunting. The name is obviously a nod to the Real IRA, although the CA in this case stands for Country Action and not Countryside Alliance, apparently.

Its first high-profile operation did nothing to undermine the paramilitary allusion. Posters showing a balaclava-wearing terrorist alongside an imprisoned huntsman were plastered on 7,000 sites across the country. Since then, it has been responsible for graffiti on motorway bridges, covering the office windows of anti-hunt MPs with irremovable stickers, and putting huntsman astride two giant white horses, at Kilburn in North Yorkshire, and Uffington in Oxfordshire.

The Real CA was formed after a dinner party in May, when a dozen hunt supporters came together to discuss ways of ensuring the campaign to save hunting kept its momentum.

"Over the following weeks, various phone calls led to one thing and another, and we found we were getting a lot of common ground. We had to allow those people who wanted to take matters further to do so, and we felt that if we empowered them it would at least mean the Countryside Alliance would be able to talk genuinely about the rage that was being felt in the countryside," Mr Duke says.

The Real CA is not an organisation as such, he says, but instead is made up of 17 or 18 "cells" - as if the terrorist connotations weren't already strong enough - who act independently, but are in regular contact.

"People ring up and say 'We have had this idea, and we're going to do this'. Once or twice, I have said 'I don't agree with that'. I'm not a fan of graffiti on motorway bridges, but to some people it makes a statement and I would not stop them," he says.

As the Real CA is such a loose grouping, he is not its spokesman as such, but, as a former chief executive of the Countryside Alliance, leaving after just three months in frustration at its internal politics, he was already a high-profile figure. "I was out in the open, and I just thought 'O, f*** it, I might as well do some talking," he says.

He is certainly a good talker, and his background and no-nonsense manner make him ideal as the uncompromising voice of hunting in the face of his anti-elitist opponents. He is utterly charming throughout our two hours together, but has an air that he could turn quite intimidating if he chose, which is probably also an advantage, given his position.

The next step in the campaign is a full page advert in national newspapers - costing around £37,000 a time - the main thrust of which is the message that "It is time for action not words". It's not unreasonable to see this as in incitement to further direct action. "A lot of people will read that in different ways. People waited over a year for their march, and it was brilliant, but now there is nothing else. These people want to get active," he says.

The posters, stickers and graffiti have just been phase one of the campaign, with phases two and three still to come. What's next, I ask?

"I could tell you, but I would have to kill you," he smiles - at least I think he's joking. "There are a lot of things planned, which will be targeted at government and government installations. There are a few spectacular things planned, but I'm not going to say what they are.

"This Government really has to be aware of the anger that is being felt by people."

If this sounds faintly ominous, what comes next is a little more disturbing. "You saw 400,000 people in London marching, and not one person stepped out of line. But if we wanted to take 400,000 people to London and let them loose, it would be frightening. I think we're capable of doing that, if we want," he says.

"There is a boiler out there, and the head of steam is getting enormous. The Real CA has been a small release valve, but it isn't enough to let the pressure out, so it is going to blow one day."

There were people on the march who they had to keep down, he says, to stop them causing trouble, with a particular strength of feeling in North Yorkshire, East Anglia and Wales. "We try to stall them, but they are available to be used," he says, hardly bothering to disguise the warning.

Despite this, he says they do not want to disrupt the public, who are largely ambivalent over foxhunting, and they would certainly stop short of hurting anyone, which would have been phase four. The targets will be principally MPs, who, after all, are the ones who will decide the matter.

Tactics which have been considered - and so far rejected - include putting nitrogen-filled balloons in cars in city centres, causing chaos as the police are forced to call in the bomb squad, and setting fire to an RSPCA bus which toured the country calling for a hunt ban.

He would stop short of breaking the law himself, although he would defy a law against hunting and would be prepared to go to prison. Although he doesn't see any room for compromise unless the Government backs down, he says the difficulty of enforcing a ban is their ultimate trump card.

"If they ban hunting, and all these people carry on, what are they going to do? There is no way of locking us all up, unless they move to martial law and use the Army," he says. "If that happened on the streets of Britain, the Government will have lost credibility. They will bring themselves down.

"We're desperately trying to stop Tony Blair painting himself into a corner. He may well try for a compromise, but his backbenchers won't accept it. I d on't see a middle way, because I know what both sides stand for. I think there is going to be confrontation." It's a frightening thought.

As I take my leave, his wife Penny, who has just arrived home, calls out: "You will be nice to us, won't you?" I would hardly dare be anything else.