Oh no! Not Margaret Beckett

Just the mere mention of her name is enough to put even the healthiest farmer into a coma . . . the don't-wake-up-for-20-years kind, by which time your wife no longer makes her daily visit to your bedside, reading the paper from cover to cover and telling you about the children in the hope that you wake up.

Even if you ever managed to crack open your crusted eyelids again after two decades in limbo and smell the diseased hospital air for yourself you would find that your loving, til-death-do-us-part other half had set up a new home with that agri-consultant who was always, if you think about, a little too familiar for your liking.

But who's fault is this? Which woman has the ability to strike all farmers with such paralysis simply by uttering her moniker? Well, Margaret Beckett of course. Dear Mrs Beckett's tenure of the Department of Food and Rural Affairs had a certain Keystone Cops element to it. No, that's not fair: she made the Keystone Cops look like a competent police force.

Indeed, give her a microphone or a stint at the despatch box and Beckett would develop her own strain of a deadly virus known within the Commons as foot-in-mouth disease.

Five years at the helm of this office saw her preside over the implementation of the Single Farm Payment, a fiasco that cost the British taxpayer the small matter of £500 million in EU fines, not forgetting the trauma incurred on Britain's farmers who were made to jump through more hoops than the Crufts display team. Many were left on the breadline as a result of the catastrophe, some were driven over the edge as money took months to materialise.

It could still be another year before the system is running properly. But while being heavily criticised by a parliamentary select committee for her handling of the payments' affair, Beckett somehow emerged unscathed from her meddlesome premiership of Defra.

Her admirers, those that I could find, can only manage to confirm that she's "as tough as old boots". But ever since I repeated that remark my own pair of tough old boots have gone into something of a sulk. They don't mind being a metaphor for Germaine Greer but Beckett is a step too far.

So no wonder there were cheers from the fields when Beckett was given her marching orders, to take up a post as Foreign Secretary two years ago.

Of course, wounds take some time to heal and the scar tissue always begin to itch whenever Beckett appears in the papers, or is heard whining on the radio, but most farmers are openly hoping that the architect of their demise will soon fall flat on her face.

For many, that opportunity has arrived in glorious technicolour as she becomes the new chairman of the Intelligence and Security Committee, overseeing the work of MI5, MI6, GCHQ and the Defence Intelligence staff.

For Beckett and intelligence go together like an organic farmer and a tub of fertiliser. Perhaps if she dealt with terrorists the same way she treated farmers then Britain would easily win the fight against al-Qaeda.

By Rural Affairs Editor Nathan Rous