At the height of the fuel crisis, Margaret Beckett denounced that part of conservative Britain which tolerated elections only when they brought victories to the Right. 'There is a group of people in this country who passionately believe... that there is something terribly, terribly wrong about having a Labour government,' she said. 'Labour ought never to be in power and if we are we ought to fail.' She was ridiculed as a barking conspiracy theorist by those who forgot the plots of MI5, retired colonels and Napoleonic tycoons against the Wilson administrations, but not by those who have been keeping an eye on the Countryside Alliance. The Alliance's fight to save hunting is no longer being waged with vaguely rational arguments. Enter its collective mind and you are in a war of national liberation against an alien and depraved dictatorship. If you think I'm exaggerating, ask how Sam Butler, the Alliance's chairman, could bellow without a blush to a demonstration outside the Labour Party Conference: 'Our forefathers didn't fight Hitler to have this lot take away our liberties.' One of Butler's forefathers was 'Rab' Butler. He didn't fight Hitler, he appeased him throughout the Thirties and then aided Lord Halifax's manoeuvres to force Churchill to come to terms with the Nazi in 1940. His grandson cannot spot the difference between a Government which is reluctantly allowing a free vote on hunting in response to overwhelming public and backbench pressure, and a totalitarian invader.  Because Parliament will sooner or later ban hunting with dogs, the MPs who support the new Hitler must be presented as human filth; unnatural and unEnglish politicians who have forfeited the right to legislate.  The magazine Earth Dog, Running Dog, for example, which carries the Countryside Alliance's logo, said of Ben Bradshaw, the gay Labour MP for Exeter: 'Fortunately most people are still totally revolted by such lifestyles. Let us not forget the money the health service is forced to spend on the treatment of Aids - the gay plague.<I>Do we really deserve to have such people rule us and tell us what to do ?'</I> Bradshaw's black colleague, Oona King, meanwhile was 'typical of her species'. She was told to 'direct her talents to advising her scrounging supporters on how to claim more handouts [the editorialist means the London poor King represents, not farmers]. <I>She has no right to interfere in my life or anybody else's, apart from the deadbeats who helped send her to Parliament.'</I> Butler has told his troops that the Government's record was one of 'terrorists released, rioters allowed to roam the streets wreaking havoc and destruction, whilst the authorities look on'. The Alliance 'has made it clear to Parliament and public alike that we have been resolute in our determination to conduct our protests within the law.<I> However, should Parliament act perversely on the issue of personal freedom, then it will only have itself to blame for what may follow.'</I> (My italics throughout).  As you can see, the anti-hunting campaign isn't only about hunting. The Alliance is a porte-manteau stuffed with every rage against women, gays, blacks, the poor, the Good Friday Agreement ... a damnable modern world turned upside down.  Butler's prediction that hunters will take the law into their own hands if the deviants in Parliament 'act perversely' is already being realised. The provisional wing of the Countryside Alliance is the Rural Action Group. It affects an air of conspiratorial secrecy, while neglecting to take elementary precautions to protect its emails. The most recent warns of the need to 'keep quiet' about its plans for tractor and Land Rover owners to blockade Parliament Square (on 23 October, traffic wardens should note).  If this sounds like an imitation of the tactics of the flying fuel pickets, then the resemblance may be more than coincidental. You do not have to go all the way with Beckett's notion that the oil refinery protests were a plot to be struck by the overlap between the demonstrators, the Countryside Alliance and the Conservative Party. Protesters' cars at the Stanlow oil refinery bore Alliance stickers. Where Tony Blair was confronted with demonstrators in Hull they carried banners crying 'No Hunting, No Petrol'. Liberal commentators responded by dissecting the hypocrisy of supportive Conservative politicians and newspapers who usually demand punitive sanctions against greedy strikers 'holding the country ransom'. But in truth their double-standard charge cut both ways. If Lefties believe urban workers are entitled to take action to protect their livelihoods, how can they criticise farmers suffering in the wors  agricultural depression since the Thirties for following suit?  Honest critics would be forced to hold their tongues if the Alliance and its fellow travellers represented the countryside. Predictably, they do nothing of the sort. Sam Butler isn't a persecuted yeoman, but a millionaire estate agent who has made his fortune by selling Cotswold property to the commuters and second-home owners who price the local peasantry out of the market. Britain's biggest builders - Robert McAlpine, Sunley Holdings, Persimmon Homes - are among his backers. So too is the Duke of Devonshire who wants to bring open-cast mining to his Derbyshire estate. These are 'countrymen' who are 'for field sports, not fields', as the International Fund for Animal Welfare neatly put it.  They are also the Tory party on horseback. The Alliance offices are filled with ex-Conservative officials and MPs who lost their jobs in the 1997 massacre. Conservative councillors joined the refinery picket lines. My guess is that the Government's attempts to strike a deal with fuel blockaders before their deadline runs out in 28 days will be futile. Their Tory wing may find it hard to see the political mileage in compromise.  The losers from the hijacking of rural grievance by the estate agents and developers are poor farmers. The best hope for an agricultural industry being crucified by a high pound is early entry to the European monetary union. The Alliance will no more support scrapping the pound than gay marriage or a windfall tax on the oil cartel.  Hunters themselves have respectable arguments against the faux humanitarianism of prohibiting hunting with dogs but not with guns. They might ask that if the language of socialism is the language of priorities, what seriously radical Labour Party would waste a moment on fox hunting after 18 years in opposition? They could, and indeed have, concluded that their opponents are more concerned with persecuting hunters than saving foxes.  For all that, the reasons to tolerate hunting have been destroyed by the hunting lobby. Any civilised person who has gaped at its bigotry can only shrug and mutter: all persecution is fine by me.    <B>And the biggest criminal is ... the governor, apparently</B>As our politicians are meant to be eager to save us from crime, you might have thought that a prison governor who managed to turn criminals into law-abiding citizens would be f&ecirc;ted.  Yet Eoin McLellan-Murray, the governor of Blantyre House, was loathed. He ran a prison with the lowest number of positive drug tests of any jail in Britain. It didn't help him.  Just 8 per cent of his inmates reoffended on release. The achievement served only to goad his enemies. In April they organised a raid by 80 officers dressed as if they were a Swat team breaking up a terrorist cell. McLellan-Murray was suspended and his jail was ransacked.  His offence was to run a liberal prison which prepared inmates for release by letting them work for Kent employers and charities.  Given the jail's success, reasons had to be found for destroying its regime. Martin Narey, the Director General of the Prison Service, told the Commons Home Affairs Committee in May that he had confidential intelligence of villainy in the jail which he couldn't discuss for fear of prejudicing criminal investigations. Kent Police said there were no criminal investigations.  His officers had uncovered stolen goods and escape equipment as they tore through the cells, Narey continued. He did not tell MPs that 'stolen' bank cards were the legally held property of working prisoners and the escape equipment was the tools of a prisoner who was repairing a Mencap charity shop.  This week the Home Affairs Committee will call Narey back to explain himself. Understandably, he has asked to give his evidence in secret. I hope the MPs will turn him down and ask why they were spun dark tales of criminal conspiracy and contraband which cannot be substantiated.  They should also inquire about the fate of the governor. Since the biggest raid in the recent history of the Prison Service failed to find anything McLellan-Murray need be ashamed of, he has been subjected to months of interrogation by Home Office hardliners desperate to find a justification for zero tolerance reduced to absurdity.  Last week, they gave us their best shot. Harry Fletcher, the spokesman for the probation officers union, reports McLellan-Murray will face disciplinary charges of failing to account for the purchase of a gas cylinder worth 110, two electric sockets priced at 8.56 and a 500 donation to the mentally ill from the prison's charitable funds.  He is not being accused of pocketing the money. It is merely that he or one of his subordinates didn't fill out the right forms when they dealt with the paperwork. For these terrible sins, one of the finest public servants in the Home Office will see his career wrecked while Narey's flourishes. 'Scandal' is an overused word by hacks, but in this instance no other will do.