IT WAS a Tory old guard of five former Cabinet ministers leading the attack today on Labour MP Mike Foster's Bill to outlaw fox-hunting - with ex-agriculture supremo Douglas Hogg alone tabling 124 separate amendments in a bid to block it.

But it was the officially hands-off government that was set to reap the backlash for the Bill's impending failure.

For while, through failing to allow parliamentary time, the Blair administration has already thwarted the will of both the majority of the public and the Commons, given the massive vote in support of Mr Foster's Bill when it was first introduced, it is now becoming patently hostile to the anti-hunting movement.

Today we see Home Secretary Jack Straw dealing the abolitionists a severe set-back as he claimed Labour had no mandate to ban hunting and seemed anxious to prevent anti-hunt campaigners from amending the government's law and order legislation to include a ban in view of the expected failure - probably next Friday - of Mr Foster's Bill. Why this firming up of the government's antipathy towards the anti-hunting movement despite its formally neutral stance?

For while the government has long wanted this Bill to be stopped before it reaches the Lords so that its main legislative programme is not hindered, it is evident that now it has got the jitters over the upsurge of the pro-hunting countryside lobby. Mr Straw's "spoiler" remarks today and the sudden conciliatory tone taken by ministers are testimony to that.

It wants to see the whole issue bogged down in some inquiry and shoved to the sidelines. It may not be so lucky.

For fox hunting, like all matters involving cruelty to animals, is a highly-emotive issue and too many people are too hostile to it to be content to see the prospect of abolition shoved off the parliamentary agenda and into the political sidelines.

When that happens, the government may claim its fingerprints are not on the deed. But an angered anti-hunting lobby will hand it the blame - because if it has not officially hindered this Bill, it will still be perceived as having done the opposite of helping it.

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