As wildfires continue to rage all over Britain, Ian Botham has skittled the stumps of the guilty men and women responsible.

Botham, cricketing legend turned passionate countryside campaigner, blames eco zealots for the destruction of Britain’s green and pleasant, aided and abetted by gormless politicians and civil servants in thrall to the deranged ‘rewilding’ cult.

This week Lord Beefy wrote in The Daily Telegraph: ‘What makes me angry, very angry, is that lives need not be at risk. For our wildfire crisis is man-made. It is the result of dreadful policy mistakes repeated year after year. For two decades we have added far too much vegetation to our landscape and we are now suffering the consequences.

‘Another genius move has been to stop preventative burning of heather. The winter burns used to create firebreaks. Now we have huge expanses of continuous, ageing vegetation.

‘The result is disaster after disaster. The massive fires at Saddleworth in 2018 and Fylingdales in 2025 started on land where winter burns had been blocked. At Saddleworth, five million people inhaled poisonous smoke. By some estimates, 28 died prematurely.’

His remarks reinforced the findings of another brilliant Saturday Essay by the Daily Mail’s Robert Hardman.

Most of the fires which have engulfed the landscape could have been, if not avoided then certainly contained had controlled burns, which create natural firebreaks, not been abandoned.

A ‘nature knows best’ policy has prevented the removal from fields of dead debris, ie: tinder, and encouraged the unrestrained spread of vegetation which only adds fuel to the flames.

Now they’re stepping up their attack on the grouse moors, which have been meticulously managed by gamekeepers, who have always been the first to spot fire outbreaks and extinguish them. The justification is that commercial shooting damages the moors and endangers other wildlife as well as the grouse being shot. The truth is that this is largely politically motivated by hatred of rich folk killing defenceless birds.

Nor is this eco idiocy confined to stoking wildfires. These days if much of Britain isn’t going up in flames, it’s under water because of flooding caused by exactly the same kind of brain-dead civil servants and quangocrats responsible for rewilding.

Botham, cricketing legend turned passionate countryside campaigner, blames eco zealots for the destruction of Britain’s green and pleasant

Defra and the Environment Agency give every impression of being dysfunctional bureaucracies staffed exclusively by urban, green zealots in Birkenstock sandals, who have little or no ‘lived experience’ of managing farmland and waterways and always put political bigotry and protected species before people.

The biblical floods which regularly make life a misery for tens of thousands are the direct result of policies, implemented to create more wetlands for wildlife at the expense of farmers and homeowners.

This madness has been going on for years and has been well documented here. For instance, widespread flooding in the Thames Valley was caused by the Environment Agency abandoning dredging of the river to protect an endangered mollusc called the Depressed River Mussel – an old favourite of this column, especially Gary. And to hell with the impact on riverside home owners.

In the Somerset Levels, they pursued a deliberate policy of increasing flooding by halting dredging to promote water voles, greater water parsnips, silver diving beetles and marsh grasshoppers. There are plenty of other examples.

Money which could have been spent on proper flood defences and reliable power sources has been frittered away on vanity projects such as bird sanctuaries and useless wind farms. If they cared that much about the environment they wouldn’t be scarring the landscape with hideous War of the Worlds windmills, mile upon mile of monstrous pylons and carpeting valuable farmland with Chinese-made solar panels which are utterly useless when the sun don’t shine.

The reality is that the biggest threat to the environment – and the wider economy – is posed by the environmentalists themselves. And not just in rural areas, but our townscapes too.

This rewilding lunacy – which has seen plans to reintroduce wolves to Britain – has spread beyond the countryside. Urban rewilding is now the latest obsession with Green and far-Left councils.

Last week I brought you news that views of Bournemouth sea-front are obscured after rewilding fanatics got rid of their mowers and replaced them with goats, which can’t reach the foliage creeping over the promenade. In Brighton, greenery is allowed to run wild, blocking pavements and turning a once-elegant Edwardian resort into Jungleland.

Richard Littlejohn says we don’t need the Prime Minister to tell us that these aluminium BBQs are fire hazards

Nine out of ten councils in the UK have stopped regular mowing of grass verges and parkland in the name of encouraging ‘biodiversity’. That’s their story, anyway, and they’re sticking to it.

Far more likely is that they’ve added not mowing the grass to the list of other things they’re paid for but can’t be bothered to do – such as emptying the dustbins every week, levelling the pavements, filling in potholes, you name it – simply to save money and shed staff.

Failure to mow the verges is not only ugly but can be downright dangerous. A couple of days ago I was pulling out of a slip road at our local shopping parade in north London, attempting to cross a main road to turn right. The bushes had grown so high, I couldn’t see any oncoming traffic – and I drive a tall-ish SUV.

Walk through any of Britain’s once beautifully tended 27,000 city parks – part of our glorious municipal inheritance – and you’ll find many of them overgrown with brambles, weeds and other out-of-control vegetation.

It can only be a matter of time before this madcap policy extends to those remaining recreation grounds and sports fields which haven’t been sold off to developers for housing.

How long before they get round to cricket pitches? If Beefy Botham was bowling from the Pavilion End at Lord’s these days, he’d have to fight his way through thickets of weeds and long grass, taking extra care not to run into one of the goats hired to maintain the outfield.

And what is Andy Pandy doing to fight the current wildfire crisis. After this week’s Cobra meeting, he announced a clampdown on the sale of disposable barbecues, which responsible supermarkets have already withdrawn from the shelves.

We don’t need the Prime Minister to tell us that these aluminium BBQs are fire hazards. In our local country parks there are large signs at every entrance forbidding portable barbecues and warning the rules will be strictly enforced.

He also promised more money for the fire brigades who have been battling the fires round the clock. But that’s just treating the symptom, not the root cause.

Unless he reins in the rewilding fanatics, listens to the gamekeepers, farmers and countryfolk who have been tending the land for centuries, and insists on proper firebreaks taking precedence over letting nature run wild, then there’ll only be one outcome:

Burn, Baby, Burnham.