The Shropshire cow elected as MP

In casting around for ways to highlight the plight of farming communities, some young farmers come up with a bright idea - why not get a cow called Honesty to stand for Parliament?

In true storybook style, Honesty is promptly elected, and takes her place at Westminster as Britain’s first bovine MP.

Such is the plot of “Honesty MP”, a debut novel by a Shropshire writer, who goes under the nom de plume Dee Aitchison. That name is a play on her own initials, D.H.

Dee, who is from Shrewsbury and retired, does not want her true identity revealed.

“I just want to keep my privacy,” she explained.

Honesty, it turns out, is based on a real-life Shropshire cow.

Dee worked for a while on a dairy farm in south Shropshire. At the height of the BSE and new variant CJD scare, she felt that there had not been enough research done.

“A few months later there was a calf born at the farm where I worked, called Honesty. The bull, her father, was Integrity. So she was a combination of Honesty and Integrity. I felt she would be better in Parliament, combining honesty and integrity, than those already there.”

It planted the seeds of the story, although she did not feel at that time she had enough skill to write it.

Then came other developments in farming, including the foot and mouth epidemic which led to mass slaughter. Dee was distressed by Government policies and its failure to look at other options and independent scientific opinions.

It was the birth in Cumbria of a second calf, again called Honesty, and again sired by Integrity, that prompted the book.

“At that point I decided to put pen to paper and write the story because there was so much more to put in it than there had been in 1996.

“I think there is a message in it - animal sentience, as much as anything. I am very fond of cows - it’s promoting cows.”

Honesty MP is published by GET Publishing of Bridgnorth and costs £8.99.