Is this the death of horse racing?

I don’t miss too many from the political world I once inhabited but I was saddened by the death of Sir Christopher Meyer, the diplomat who was famously made ambassador to Washington by Tony Blair with the instruction to ‘get up the arse of the White House and stay there’.

Chris added pepper and salt to the niceties of the diplomatic scene: after being ambassador to Germany he agreed with Mark Twain that: ‘A German joke is no laughing matter.’ I enjoyed jousting with him in his days as John Major’s press secretary and the last time I met Chris, at a Jeffrey Archer party, I reminded him of the seating instruction he gave when planning his Downing Street leaving party: ‘Politicians and journalists one end, human beings at the other.’

The horses are being looked after in the heat. Newbury’s arrangements on Saturday were exemplary, with no horses being returned to the winners’ enclosure after races. Instead all were doused down swiftly amid mist fans in a cooling-down area next to the track. It is racing’s human beings who are bearing the brunt of the sport’s current crisis of falling attendances, smaller field sizes, soaring travel and feed costs and insufficient prize money to stop the best horses being bought up to run overseas. The latest two trainers to announce they are closing down their yards are Harry Dunlop and Joe Tuite. I am intimate with neither but respect them both.

Joe Tuite is the kind of decent man who, having found my mobile phone in an Ascot car park took the trouble to see it returned to me. Having undergone a robust racing education by working for Jenny Pitman and then spending eight years as an assistant to Mick Channon, Joe set up on his own in Lambourn in 2010.

If nothing else proved his considerable ability, it was training the glass legged Litigant to win both the Ebor and the November Handicap in 2015, and when I visited his Felstead Court yard in May 2017 he told me: ‘Racing is in a strong position. There is no shortage of people looking to buy a horse.’ But that was before Covid. There was no shortage then: now there is.

Harry Dunlop started out a little earlier in Peter Walwyn’s old Lambourn yard in the autumn of 2006. As an assistant previously both to Nicky Henderson and Henry Cecil, he had a perfect pedigree. His father John, based at Arundel, won a Derby with Shirley Heights and three St Legers, while brother Ed is a successful Newmarket trainer.

When I visited him three years into his career, the approachable Harry Dunlop was honest enough to say that progressing up his own learning curve he had probably ‘galloped the tripes out of a few’ before they got to the racecourse but his optimism was infectious, particularly, I remember, for a filly which had run Henry Cecil’s Midday to a nostril as a two-year-old. He has trained Group winners and done well in France, as well as in Britain but has found the soaring costs since Brexit a major handicap and is down from 40 to 14 horses. If trainers like Harry Dunlop and Joe Tuite can’t make a go of it then racing really is in trouble.

Part of the pleasure of being at Newbury last Saturday was seeing the racing strips of green grass on the course while the lawn at home looks like my own small strip of the Alabama desert. The other 90 per cent of the pleasure was provided by Blewbury trainer Eve Johnson Houghton following victory in the Group 2 Hungerford Stakes with the 9-1 Jumby for owners Anthony Pye-Jeary and David Ian.

In between dousing Jumby and most of us nearby with buckets of water, Eve was bouncing: ‘I’ve always believed in him. He’s been knocking on the door and he deserves this. We kept going for big handicaps and being placed and I wanted to win one first but then I thought sod it, we’ll go for a Group race. He’ll be going on to bigger and better things now.’ Eve’s own belief in Jumby had been supplemented by the successful jockey William Buick, who knows him well. ‘When you consider the type of horses William rides that makes me believe even more,’ she told me.

Eve’s day got even better – for her and me. When I saw her great big Nathaniel filly Suzy’s Shoes before the 1m 3f maiden I couldn’t take my eyes off her and Charles Bishop brought her home an easy winner. It wrecked my Placepot at the sixth and final stage but at 5-2 I wasn’t complaining. Her sheer size hasn’t made her easy to train but Suzy’s Shoes too will surely go on to better things.

You could only sympathise, though, with Kevin Frost, who trained Documenting to win the seven furlong handicap. Recently the 24-horse yard had eight winners in a fortnight. As he noted: ‘You’d have hoped that might have brought in a few more owners but these days you just have to keep your head down.’