Adrian Barber

Jeremy Clarkson calls his land agent Cheerful Charlie because the man has never once brought him good news. Five series. Not a single piece of it. Watch the pattern and it stops being a running joke. Clarkson has an idea. Charlie opens the folder. The idea costs more than it earns, or the yield will not carry it, or the rules do not allow it, or the money runs out in March. Clarkson goes ahead anyway. Charlie is right. Nobody thanks him, and next episode the same thing happens again. Now notice what he is actually doing in every one of those scenes. He is not being pessimistic. He is reading out the arithmetic of British farming to a man who does not want to hear it, and the arithmetic never says yes. The nickname is a joke about Charlie's manner. It is a description of the industry. Because look at what the job now consists of. Harper Adams lists what a land agent has to handle: planning law, agricultural management, budgeting, finance, construction, property law, machinery purchasing, valuation and negotiation. Nine trades. Charlie has an agriculture degree from Nottingham, is a registered agricultural valuer and a qualified agronomist, spent years at Strutt and Parker, has over two decades in the field and is a partner at Ceres Rural. Clarkson could have hired anybody in Britain. He hired the real thing in 2019, and the real thing has spent five years saying no. That is the state of it. The best-qualified man on the farm, applying twenty years of training to a thousand acres, and the professional answer is almost always that it will not work. Then the bit that turns the whole story over. Harper Adams says applications and open day numbers on its Land and Property Management course have felt a ripple effect from the show, and their lecturer names Charlie as the reason. He praised exactly the thing Clarkson mocks him for: the no-nonsense approach, the refusal to dress anything up. So a generation of teenagers watched a middle-aged man deliver bad news on television for five years, and a chunk of them thought, that is the job I want. Not the tractor. Not the pub. Not the fame. The folder. They watched somebody be quietly, unglamorously right in a room full of people who did not want to hear it, and they recognised it as a kind of competence worth having. That is a better advert for a profession than any campaign has ever managed, and nobody designed it. Every trade in this country has a Charlie. The one who tells you what it will actually cost, who gets ignored, and who turns out to be right in about eight weeks. He is never the one they make the programme about. He is the reason there is a farm left to film.

Mutton built Britain, and Britain can no longer buy it. For a thousand years the word for sheep meat here was mutton. Not lamb. The meat of a grown animal, two years or older, that had lived its whole life on grass and heather and come off it dark, dense and deep. It was the Sunday roast and the coaching-inn chop. On the Titanic, first class ate mutton and second class got the lamb, because mutton was the better meat and everyone knew it. Now walk into any supermarket and try to find a cut. You cannot. Lamb, and only lamb. Taste did not kill it. A fibre and a war did. The national flock was kept for wool as much as meat, so sheep lived for years, and a sheep that lives for years and then goes in the pot is mutton. Then synthetics replaced wool, the fleece stopped paying, and nobody kept a sheep to adulthood. On top of that, rationing served a whole generation grey mutton boiled to death in institutional vats, and they came out the far side loathing the word. Their children were raised on soft young lamb, and mutton was quietly buried. The meat that paid for the cathedrals, gone in forty years, finished off by a change of trousers and a decade of bad cooks. Now the hope, and brace yourself, because it is the single best argument against abolishing the monarchy you will ever read. The King has been trying to bring mutton back for twenty years. It is his favourite dinner. In 2004, having heard how little hill farmers got for their older ewes, he founded a thing called the Mutton Renaissance, with actual standards: forage-fed, over two years old, properly hung. Over a hundred producers and dozens of restaurants now stand behind it. A man born in a palace turns out to be the one person in the country doing something useful about the national sheep, which is either a stirring case for constitutional continuity or a damning indictment of everyone else. Possibly both. He is right, mind, because mutton wins on every count going. The eating is richer than anything lamb manages. The nutrition is better, because a grown animal that spent years on grass built up more of everything a baby never had time to. The ethics are better, because it lived a full life on a hillside rather than being hurried off to slaughter as an infant. And the environment is better, because these are native breeds turning upland grass and heather, ground that grows nothing else, into food without a ploughed field in sight. It is also the perfect partner to wool. Keep a sheep long enough to shear it for years and you get the fleece and the mutton off one animal. Rescue one and you rescue the other, and the upland farmer ends up with two products instead of none. The way back is two words at the butcher's counter. Ask for hogget, a sheep in its second year, the gentle way in, more flavour than lamb and still tender. Then graduate to mutton proper and braise the shoulder low and slow until it falls off the bone. Neither is in the supermarket, because neither suits a system built on identical young carcasses. Both sit in every proper farm shop and every butcher who buys straight off a hill farm, and both are cheaper than the lamb beside them, because the demand was killed and never rebuilt. Britain forgot mutton because wool died and the army boiled it grey. The sheep never forgot how to grow up. The King is asking nicely. You only have to ask the butcher.