The past few days have been rather hectic, and different from my usual, run-of-the-mill existence. I had to put my mind to David Dimbleby's Question Time on BBC Television. It was held in Exeter, largely so that we would be on site, as it were, for discussions on the foot-and-mouth issue.

There was no direct train to Exeter. Thanks to Railtrack, we travelled to Taunton, and then drove to Exeter.

There is always much more to a recorded programme than what is actually screened. The locals were extremely angry at the government of the day. There was hardly a Labour Party supporter in the audience, except perhaps for Ben Bradshaw, the local MP, who was also minding Baroness Hayman, the minister for agriculture who was on the panel. Dimbleby did well to contain the audience. About two weeks before, I had been in nearby Totnes, and there was not a hint that the temperature had risen to such an explosive level. BSE, swine fever, floods, and now foot-and-mouth, had driven them to the edge.

The irreversible movement from small farms to much larger units means the ruin of many. Add the hundreds of thousands who had planned to march in London under the banner of the Countryside Alliance, and the voiceless millions who are deeply suspicious about the quality of the food that appears on their plates, and we have something close to what we old-timers call a pre-revolutionary situation. Nothing said or done by this government meets the gravity of the situation. Tony Blair resembles Kerensky, the vacillating prime minister in the lead-up to the Russian revolution.

I have myself found a meat farmer from whom I can order what is advertised as "meat the natural way", knowing that it will be on my doorstep the following day. No more shopping around for meat in supermarkets. Now both Mrs Howe and I can say, hands on hearts, that we have a self-interest in the small farmer and the British countryside. Maybe the next step is to join the Countryside Alliance.

Back in London, I met a group of remarkable young women who are making a documentary about people of mixed race. They invited me to take part and I was told that Tony Benn, who has mixed-race grandchildren, had also agreed to participate. For the first time in public, I talked about my concern for my two mixed-race daughters, now 35 and 30, and how I had nurtured them. I had acted spontaneously over the years, without quite realising that I had instinctively grasped what began as a very difficult situation.

Their mother became pregnant early in our relationship. She had come up from Cornwall to the Slade School of Fine Art in London. She came from quite a respectable family, which was having none of it. I was hauled before a huge tribunal of parents, aunts, uncles and so on, and told I had no choice but to do the honourable thing. (How times have changed!) So she became my first wife.

But this group of civilised, middle-class egalitarians was most concerned about the offspring of the marriage. "They will be neither fish nor fowl," they said. "They will be half of this and half of the other." Yet I developed a deep affection for both my daughters far beyond natural parental love and caring. To this day, whenever we meet, I call them "my girls . . ." and they instinctively add ". . . are the creme de la creme".

In explaining all this, it helped that both the interviewer and the director were of mixed race themselves. The term doesn't help, though. It was dreamed up by bureaucrats at the Home Office. "Half-caste" had become objectionable, a term of racist abuse.

We talked into the night and, at a cafe in the West End of London, a huge white man walked in and leaned over the table. I panicked. He held out his hand and told me he had been a National Front organiser. He said that he had seen me on television and read the NS, and that I was responsible for converting him from the evils of fascism. It was good enough for me, and good enough for those young mixed-race women, as they teased a little essence out of what has been a lifetime's racial poisoning.