The perennial controversy over the Royal Family's passion for bloodsports has reignited after images emerged appearing to show a member of the Duke of Edinburgh's party clubbing a fox to death with a flagpole during a shoot in the grounds of the Queen's Sandringham estate.

The photographs are front page news in The Sunday Times, which headlines the story: 'Pest control — Sandringham style'. The Mail on Sunday offers an even more unequivocally damning headline in 'The killing field'.

In the past, the Queen herself — usually above criticism — has been condemned by newspaper columnists and animal rights activists after she was photographed wringing the neck of a pheasant after it was hit and wounded, rather than killed outright, during a shoot at her Norfolk home.

Now it is her husband who is at the centre of the latest storm of controversy.