Lady Apsley's no-nonsense fight for the countryside

Lady Apsley will sometimes lean out of her bedroom window, which overlooks the magnificent Bathurst estate in Gloucestershire, and take pot-shots at grey squirrels. It doesn’t sound very lady-like, but she doesn’t care.

“They are a complete menace,” she tells me. “Why do people think they are cute and fluffy? All they do is destroy trees, birds and wildlife.”

Grey squirrels are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to contentious topics for discussion - Lady Apsley is a passionate woman who will do anything to defend the rural idyll and, in her terms, doesn’t believe in ‘faffing about.’

“If there is a problem in the countryside, I will do all I can to correct it,” she adds.

Take supermarkets. “Oh don’t get me started,” she says with a sweep of her arm. Of course with that, I sit back with a piece of birthday cake (it is the day before her 45th birthday) and she gets started.

“Supermarkets are bullying, brutish, capitalistic, profit-obsessed robots,” she says.

“First, I think they are destroying communities. When I was young we shopped in the local town, we interacted with our local businesses, our neighbours and there was a care in the community. Now that connection has gone.

“Second, the supermarkets squeeze prices down to absolutely nothing and then watch as thousands of farmers go out of business.

“I would love to see them pull their fingers out and perhaps lose a couple of million off their profit and take some responsibility for our farmers.”

She even goes ‘a bit communist’ by suggesting a minimum price under which supermarkets would be prohibited from buying.

Supermarkets are on the Lady’s radar, and with her recent appointment as spokeswoman for the Women’s Food and Farming Union (WFU), her job is to fly the flag for farmers.

Her first move of note has been to initiate a ‘Ban the supermarket’ campaign to encourage consumers to give big supermarkets a miss for at least one month this summer. The campaign has‘ruffled a few feathers’, but she is unapologetic.

“It has got people talking. All I want to do is get people to think about where their food comes from, and just for one month to shop local. That might mean paying a bit more, but gosh it might encourage people to waste less too.”

Ladette to Lady

Her no-nonsense attitude may explain her business acumen, which includes a successful online clothing agency.

With previous experience of being a beauty queen - which she dismisses modestly - she has made her mark on television, advising on the Ladette to Lady television series.

But her heart has always been in the countryside. “When I was a little girl, I always said I would marry a farmer, and I did,” she says. Her mission was accomplished when she marriedLord Apsley, heir to the 17th-century, 1,618-hectare (4,000-acre) Bathurst estate in Cirencester.

Her ingrained defiance and headstrong confidence makes her an effective countryside advocate.

“When I get worked up, I tend to do something about it,” she says. And there is no better illustration of this doggedness than when foot-and-mouth disease struck in 2001.

“I was enraged by the Government’s inability to take control of the situation. The human and animal suffering was huge, and they did not have a bloody clue what they were doing,” she says.

Stunned into action, she raised £500,000 to donate to the ARC-Addington fund to help distressed farmers, and collected and presented half a million signatures to the Government, calling on Ministers to launch a public enquiry into the debacle, which had cost the country a staggering £8 billion and resulted in the death of 10 million cattle and sheep.

“We had a magnificent East End horse-drawn hearse, beautiful black horses, we wore big capes and the coffin in the back had all the signatures.

“It was wonderfully theatrical,” she says, before her upper lip curls.

“Then Alistair Campbell came along and spun us out of town when he got the hunting debate reintroduced into Parliament that same day. I was furious.”

There has never been a public enquiry, and Lady Apsley was delighted when ‘the Labour louts were finally ousted’ by David Cameron in May, handing the countryside back to ‘people that care’.

‘British grub’

Unsurprisingly, Lady Apsley is already well connected - she thinks nothing of dropping Prince Charles or Liz Hurley into the conversation - but her role as WFU spokeswoman has given her a political hook too.

In the coming weeks she is due to meet with one of those ‘men that cares’ - food and farming Minister, Jim Paice. She will urge him to do something about the proliferation of misleading food labels, the hunting ban, farm bureaucracy and the fact that troops in Afghanistan are eating Danish bacon. “We should be feeding our boys British grub,” she says defiantly.

When not fighting on the rural front line, she keeps herself stupendously busy. She is involved in 14 different charities, most notably as national vice president of Royal British Legion’s women’s section.

Even though she only took up oil painting recently, the stacks of paintings leant up around her office walls is further evidence she doesn’t do anything by half. “I love it,” she proclaims.

She also enjoys gardening, attends the local polo club, makes ‘a mean’ marmalade and supports ‘the husband’. But mention the word ‘shooting’ and her eyes light up.

“The shooting season,” she says, as we walk through the vast house; past examples of former quarries mounted on the walls, “that is when I really come alive.” She leads me out into the beautiful Bathurst estate gardens, bathed in sunshine, where we are met by her trusty gun dogs.

Lady Apsley, I conclude, is the countryside’s armed guard. I am sure any grey squirrel would agree.

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