LORD TEBBIT'S A GAME OLD BIRD

“I found all these game birds hanging up at my local butchers yet most shoppers were buying tasteless rubber-beaked chicken, Game birds are delicious, totally organic and cost less than a fiver but people were ignoring them,” he says.

The butcher explained that his customers didn’t know what to do with them so Tebbit started leaving sheets of instructions on the counter. These quickly disappeared, customers wanted more. “In the end I decided it would be simpler to write a cook book.”

The recipes in The Game Cook, with their reflections on everything from alcohol levels in cooks to the homosexuality of Mallard ducks, have proved considerably more popular than some of Lord Tebbit’s political offerings yet the country’s wild life will find little comfort in the thought that the man whom Michael Foot once called “a semi-house trained polecat” is now tied by his apron strings to the kitchen.
He’s also a steady hand with a shotgun – and this week the pheasant- shooting season started.