Listen to carrie symonds. Her kind of conservatism is the future of the party. | thearticle

The most interesting thing about Carrie Symonds is not that she’s the nation’s first First Shacked-up Girlfriend. It’s that she represents a certain segment of the new generation of voters

who have grown up immersed in concern about the health of the planet, biodiversity and humanity’s role as stewards of the natural world, and want to believe that free-market economics can

live alongside such values. The Blue-Greens (as they will never want to be known – blue-green algae is a particularly toxic form of algae that thrives in warm, polluted water) baffle the far

left, who believe that only they should be allowed to care about wildlife and also believe that the problems of the planet are serious enough to warrant restrictions of individual liberty.

But they make many Tories uneasy, too. Take the Brexiteer MP for Mansfield, Ben Bradley. Until a Twitterstorm last Saturday disabused him of the idea, he was under the impression that

chlorinated chicken is no more of a problem than chlorinated water. If Bradley had been aware of the ghastly reasons which American chicken carcasses have to be chlorinated – in brief,

because the conditions in which most American chickens are reared are permitted to be utterly unhygienic and inhumane: chickens living wing-to-wing, in filthy, windowless hangars, bred to

grow so fast their legs cannot support their weight, with no space, light, air or freedom to express natural behaviour. If Bradley realised that the chlorination process is a cover-up,

masking the fact that American chickens are rarely raised according to any acceptable welfare standards, he might have thought before tweeting. Curiously, he has signed the Conservative

Environmental Network’s manifesto which endorses “working with nature, rather than against it”. Symonds’ attack on trophy hunters may have been uncomfortable for some prominent Tories who

perhaps engage in this indefensible pastime; but more remarkable, and less noted, was the fact that at the same event she shared a platform with Chris Packham, the naturalist and broadcaster

who is permanently at war with the grouse shooting fraternity. For many of us of an older generation, it is virtually impossible to imagine a Conservative party without some vestigial

connection with the landed gentry and thus, grouse shooting. But the argument that rearing of grouse is an essential part of the British countryside has worn thin for the Blue-Greens.

Whereas once Tories saw a beautiful and biodiverse countryside as a happy side-effect of bloodsports, the Blue Greens have turned the priorities round: they believe that biodiversity should

be the priority, not the sport. The idea that rearing birds to be shot in their thousands is essential for the rural economy is going the way of the argument that fox-hunting was essential

for individual liberty. As a young Tory in the 1980s I remember being quite impressed by the idea that because some farmers like hunting, they were less likely to fell woods, hedges and

copses which give cover for foxes. Eventually it occurred to me that offering farmers the chance of an occasional canter after hounds on a wet Boxing Day morning was really rather a

roundabout way of saving our nation’s woodlands, and wasn’t working. It makes more sense just to prioritise the woodlands, and be done with it. Nor are the Blue-Greens all urbanites, with no

understanding of the countryside. Among their heroes are proper posh county types such as Isabella Tree, the chatelaine of Knepp Castle, who with her husband Sir Charles Burrell realised

decades ago that her estate could make more money by allowing nature in than by continually pouring on expensive fertilisers and degrading the soil. The Blue-Greens admire

entrepreneur-farmers such as Helen Browning, CEO of the Soil Association and a farmer born and bred, whose account of life on an organic pig farm, makes a passionate plea for genuinely

far-sighted stewardship of the land after Brexit. The Blue-Greens are Tories who have completely broken with the bloodsports business; they choose organic meat and may even be vegan. They

believe in changing culture by education, example and consumer pressure rather than by government dictat. They are not to be confused with the once-mocked “crunchy cons” in the USA –

typified as people who love to live oh-so simply, so close to nature, so long as it’s on a private ranch in Colorado with an oak-lined kitchen the size of an aircraft hangar and a helicopter

in the back yard. This new generation have careers that build on their passions, yet don’t see anything wrong with making money out of innovative energy solutions; and while they may not

favour the top-down political solutions of the Green Party they do believe that business, government and society must all engage in a massive reversal of thinking on the environment.