I was going to go to bed, but the malevolent inanity that is Jenny Riddell-Carpenter MP riled me before I could. The UK nature minister and member for Suffolk Coastal has disturbed my sleep, because she says that she cannot sleep. She told a meeting at the Labour Party conference in Liverpool on Monday what keeps her awake at night, and it was not rural bus cuts or the last shop closing in a Suffolk village. It was her own voters. She fears a ‘very far-right nostalgic vision of Britain’, one of ‘warm ale, a black labrador by your feet in a pub that doesn’t exist’, will be used against Labour at the next election. It was, she said, a ‘far-right fantasy’ that needed to be opposed.

A pub that doesn’t exist? Allow me to draw her a map. Adnams brews in Southwold, just inside the protected landscape of the Suffolk coast and heaths, and the town is in her seat. From there, a rowing-boat ferry crosses the Blyth to Walberswick for a pound, worked by a family that has pulled the oars for generations. The Bell on the far bank is 600 years old and lets dogs in. The Cross Keys at Aldeburgh has served drinks since 1540, and the Crown in Snape is a 15th-century inn with its own allotment. Most MPs would put these places on the constituency Christmas card. Ms Riddell-Carpenter prefers to tell a hall in Liverpool that they are a far-right hallucination.

Her non-existent warm ale has a pedigree she ought to recognise. She must be thinking of John Major’s speech from 1993, but he quoted from George Orwell, who had written of ‘old maids biking to Holy Communion through the mists of the autumn mornings’. Orwell was a socialist who spent years at his parents’ house in Southwold. The fantasy she fears was written by a man of the left, in her constituency. She clearly doesn’t know.

Then comes the sentence that gives her away. Labour, she said, must make the case for ‘what we believe rural communities look like’. Not what they are. What Labour believes they look like. The countryside is not to be listened to but corrected, its shape agreed at a fringe meeting and posted back to the people who live in it. When country folk describe their own lives – the pub, the dog, the Saturday match – their MP hears Ladybird nostalgia and smells fascism.

Cricket will be next on the charge sheet. Yoxford plays at Grove Park beside St Peter’s Church, and fields girls’ sides at under-11, under-13 and under-15, alongside women’s teams. At Orford, the Sudbourne Hall ground drained well enough to save every home game in a previous sodden summer, and women’s sessions ended with a Pimm’s at close of play. This is the reactionary idyll that haunts her nights.

Riddell-Carpenter cannot plead ignorance. Her family moved to Martlesham Heath when she was seven, and she went to the local Woodbridge School. At 18, she left and did not come back until the voters sent her. The years between went to London: to SOAS (oh brother), the housing developer L&Q and to the lobbying trade, where she rose to run Cratus Group. She came home remembering every pub by name and having learned in town to be embarrassed by all of them. She now chairs the Labour Rural Research Group, which is a little like putting a vegan in charge of the butcher’s.

A rural minister’s job is to carry the countryside’s case into Whitehall. This one carries Whitehall’s sneer back out and waits for the applause. Nobody who talks about her own patch like this can be trusted to defend it when a solar farm or a trail-hunting ban comes over the hill. She will side with the department and call it progress.

Riddell-Carpenter’s constituents look to have made a judgement about where her loyalties are. She won the seat in 2024 by 1,070 votes – just ahead of the Conservatives, with Reform UK a distant third. In this May’s council elections, however, Labour won no seats at all across East Suffolk, while Reform took 16. In Aldeburgh and Leiston, Labour came fourth on 9.1 per cent, down more than 24 points. Reform took Blyth Estuary, both Felixstowe divisions, Walton and the Trimleys, Wilford and Martlesham – where she grew up. In Woodbridge, her old school town, Labour came last of five parties. In Suffolk County Council, Reform won 41 of 70 seats, and Labour three.

In 2024, Labour borrowed rural seats on a protest vote against the Conservatives. Ever since it has treated the people who lent them as a problem to be managed. It taxed their farms, it is coming for their hunts, and now it tells them their pubs are imaginary. Last week, a YouGov model suggested Labour could lose 79 of its 139 rural seats in an immediate election. Suffolk Coastal looks likely to be one of them.

Orwell, as usual, diagnosed her condition: England, he wrote, is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality. Eighty-five years on, that shame represents the town where he lived.

The labrador, meanwhile, was the most registered breed in Britain last year, with nearly 30,000 new entries at the Royal Kennel Club. It is doing fine without Jenny Riddell-Carpenter. And one will still be asleep under a table at the Bell long after the MP for Suffolk Coastal has gone back to London.