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But many farms are also involved in an trial of another control method. We will get 1,000 letters a week."The National Farmers' Union wants Mr Hogg to crack down on badgers but has little confidence he will do so. "With BSE, he needs this like he needs a hole in the head," said council member Hugh Oliver-Bellasis, who wrote the union's latest report on TB and badgers.He believes the badger population is out of balance because it copes well with modern farming, and urges that those areas with the highest badger population densities should have a 10 per cent cull. "It is a problem which is causing farmers real hardship, not just through TB but the damage to crops they and their digging cause."The ministry used to gas badgers in their sets, but that practice was phased out.

Some animal rights activists have taken to releasing the trapped badgers from their cages in the night, before the men from the ministry come with their pistols.Under the current control policy, all badgers found on a cattle farm where there has been a tuberculosis outbreak are trapped and killed - provided the ministry experts believe the badgers are to blame. Today they are eliminated by luring them into traps baited with peanuts, then shooting them.About 1,500 are culled each year - far fewer than are killed on the roads. The ministry has been killing badgers in the West Country for more than 20 years in an effort to control tuberculosis in cattle but has come nowhere near eradicating the disease.Latest unpublished figures show that 316 cattle herds came down with TB last year in West England, with most of those attributed to badgers passing on the disease. There were 133 herd breakdowns in the rest of the country, none attributed to badgers. The rise has been especially marked in Hereford and Worcester, which previously had little of the disease.Mr Hogg told the House of Commons Select Committee on Agriculture this week: "I am totally convinced we have a major reservoir of entrenched TB in badgers that is causing many, not all, the problems in cattle."But Edward Leigh, Tory MP for Gainsborough and Horncastle said: "It is politically impossible for you to order a holocaust of badgers. It's not south of the M25 and not even on the north side, but outside the boundary altogether - in less smart Dorking.. A sharply increased cull of badgers is being urged on the Ministry of Agriculture because of a rise in cases of tuberculosis in cattle.

One Tory MP has warned Douglas Hogg, the Minister of Agriculture, that "a holocaust of badgers" would be politically impossible because of the outcry it would cause. Mr Hogg, under fire over the beef crisis, will be holding meetings with Ministry of Agriculture experts and study fresh evidence of the rise in TB before the end of the month. He cannot see why people should feel angry their views were ignored or why they should think him high-handed for sending round the results and then doing the opposite."If George gets defeated, he'll apply for the Chiltern Hundreds and cause a by-election, which would be disastrous," said Mr Kee.Mrs Fraser added: "It's a two-edged sword, we don't want a by-election but equally we can't have a pistol to our heads."One clincher as the members vote next Friday might be where Sir George himself chooses to live. He insisted - and he didn't like it." Mrs Fraser says the criticisms are "many and varied" and "boil down to his nature".Nothing illustrates his behaviour more perfectly, she contends, than last year's leadership contests when he polled local senior members asking how he should vote, sent round the result (55% in favour of John Major), then went on TV arguing for John Redwood.Sir George is unabashed; the poll was "consultative, not binding," he said. He is not a small-talk, cocktail party man - that is, he is actually aloof and arrogant.Angela Fraser, one of his most outspoken critics, said: "He wanted to know about his problems in the constituency, I said I would not enjoy telling him. "Are you," he says, "sent to Westminster as lobby fodder or to exercise your own judgment on matters of national importance?"If he loses the vote because some people in his constituency do not like his Euro-scepticism and his opposition to the Prime Minister in last year's leadership challenge, so be it.Yet, the issues go deeper and are to do with his personality. "That would be the last thing we would want in the association, the party, or, you could argue, the country."That is not to say, though, that Sir George should think his threat is enough to carry the day Quite the reverse. For a start, says Major-General Steele, starkly, it is inconceivable that the Tories would lose a by-election, and then the association would come together in true blue fashion, M25 or not.