At boarding school in the Fifties he is 55 he didn’t like games or

At boarding school in the Fifties (he is 55), he “didn’t like games or cold baths or being constantly occupied – you couldn’t do what you wanted”. His housemaster told him he had a bad attitude; Lacey hid among the microscopes of the biology labs.This dislike of systems and their silencing tendencies returned in the mid-Eighties when Lacey joined Maff’s veterinary products committee. “I saw how the pharmaceutical industry, the Ministry of Agriculture and the vets were manipulating the drugs for commercial gain.” In 1989 he resigned, claiming that the committee had no independence – and explaining to newspapers in detail how civil servants and the industry made it so.Lacey was becoming familiar with the power of freelance lobbying. In 1988 he had defended Edwina Currie’s claim that most British eggs contained salmonella. He felt the hot embrace of the studio lights, so convenient to reach from the manor house, with Leeds Bradford airport two minutes away over the hilltops.

A few months later he was on television again, after he and an assistant at Leeds University called Stephen Dealler found bacteria in a local supermarket. “We were working on listeria in chilled cooked food,” says Dealler, now Dr Dealler and an ally of “Prof Lacey” on BSE. “Before we had any results, Today newspaper ran a headline saying, ‘Peril in your TV dinner’. I said to Lacey, ‘We’d better put out a statement denying it.’ He said, ‘You’d better go and find some listeria.’ “And then there was beef.

In 1989 Lacey stopped eating it, and persuaded his wife and two daughters to do likewise. In an article for the Guardian he wrote, “We still don’t know whether humans can be infected from eating the meat or drinking the milk of cows suffering from BSE.” In 1990 he boldened this into a call for the slaughter of 6 million cattle, or half the national herd. The Sunday Times put it on the front page; unknown neighbours painted graffiti on his gates.Lacey retaliated like an academic. Between 1991 and 1994 he published Unfit For Human Consumption, Hard To Swallow and Mad Cow Disease. The three books were quick hits of rousing scientific populism: part polemic, with exclamation marks, against factory farming; part epidemic warning, predicting “1,500 to 9,000″ annual cases of CJD, as early as 1991; and part bossy lessons about hygiene in the kitchen (“nails should be maintained in such a way as to make washing easy”).With his tirades against microwaves and limp salads in pubs, Lacey’s scolding had a fogeyish edge But his presentation had grown modern.

In 1992 he advised the BBC on a BSE thriller called Natural Lies and was incorporated as one of the characters. Four years on, his call for a shift back to an organic agriculture – however blaringly delivered – seems as sensible as Natural Lies’ plot about the government covering up a farmer’s death from CJD “He’s raised some important issues,” says Professor Behan. “He may be wrong in the specifics but right in principle.” Chastened Maff spokesmen have given up calling Lacey “a crank” and settled on “independent”.Despite his four acres, Lacey is identifiable as a very contemporary English rebel (he prefers “sceptic”): outraged by the brutalisation of the countryside, blaming business and government for it, and using the media to reach beyond them to the public. Agree to look round his garden, where he lets grasses and thistles spread at will, “just to see what happens”, and his twinkle returns.