HUNTING with dogs could top a government poll to find England’s greatest cultural icon, despite being made illegal last February.

Yesterday, the illegal sport had risen to first place in the online poll Icons: A Portrait of England, thanks to an e-mail campaign by a pro-foxhunting group. The two-year £1 million project has been commissioned by Culture Online, part of the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, to find the artefact that best represents the slippery soul of English culture.

The directors had drawn up a list of 12 suggestions from leading figures in the arts and academia at the start of the project last week. They had approved Stonehenge, the Routemaster bus and the FA Cup as English icons before opening up the voting online.

Mike Greenwood, commissioning executive of Culture Online, said: “The great thing about interactive media is about growing something and building a community of interests and encouraging people to take ownership of it.”

He may not have had in mind Fight The Ban, the shadowy campaign group responsible for stunts to boost the morale of the hunting community. In recent months the group has staged a “squirrel hunt” outside Tony Blair’s house in Connaught Place, sent topless women on horseback to Chequers and held numerous parties attended by “Felix”, a man dressed as a fox. Soon after the Icons poll began, 1,000 Fight The Ban supporters received an e-mail from “Felix The Fox” asking them to nominate hunting. The Countryside Alliance then sent notification of the poll to 40,000 subscribers to its newsletter.

Early yesterday afternoon it had reached first place in the poll, though it later fell behind Big Ben and Morris Dancing in the vote. “We only told our readers to visit the site, though I’m not surprised they nominated foxhunting,” said Tim Bonner from the Countryside Alliance.

“David Lammy, the Minister for Culture, told an improper joke about Countryside Alliance members being victims of inbreeding at the Labour Conference last year,” he said. “It would be ironic if hunting tops his department’s own poll.”

He said that hunting was an icon of Englishness, being representative of life in the countryside and “of the fact that so much time and political effort can be spent trying to stop something and failing”.

Wanda Wyporska, from the League Against Cruel Sports, said: “If a minority group want to put forward that an icon of British life is chasing an animal to exhaustion and then ripping it to pieces then I think they are mistaken. The majority of the public wanted the ban and the majority of MPs did, too.”

A spokesman for Culture Online said: “The Icons project was always intended to inspire debate. It’s certainly captured the public imagination including a few lobby groups.”

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