“One of the older farmers marched right up to me, physically trembling with rage, and held his index finger inches away from my face: ‘Chris Packham,’ he growled.” That, for many country people, pretty much sums up the relationship crisis between metropolitan Britain and the countryside. But in Divide: The Relationship Crisis Between Town and Country, Anna Jones has a less predictable take on it.

The title, always the hardest bit to get right in any book project, excites interest because we are, in Disraelian terms, two nations now, “as ignorant of each other’s habits, thoughts and feelings as… inhabitants of different planets”. The author sets out to examine the divide in eight key areas, including community, animals, food and environment. It sets a high bar against which to judge the book, and on those terms, perhaps inevitably, it ends up being a bit of a curate’s egg.

The best thing about Divide is going on a fascinating journey with Jones from farmer’s daughter “clip-clopping around the farmyard in Mum’s heels dreaming of concrete and skyscrapers” to university, then to the BBC, producing programmes such as Farming Today and Countryfile, and a metropolitan life in Bristol.

As she morphs from the little girl going to the local Conservative Club for Sunday lunch with her grandparents to a thirty-something BBC person who “considers herself woke” and realises “without exception her friends are leftwing liberals,” Jones realises that her values are now very different from her rustic family’s. Most notably, her father, who is “a classic ‘boomer’ – unapologetically traditional – and would probably call her a snowflake if he knew what it was”.

Perhaps it is this example of life during the culture wars that helps to explain the growing cultural chasm between townsfolk who see the countryside through a BBC prism, and rural people, who haven’t changed much in decades – in Andrew Marr’s phrase: “The great condescension of the metropolis.”

By far the biggest cause of the rift was the 2004 Hunting Act, a direct assault on rural culture that had the same effect as outlawing football would have had on our inner cities. Jones’s examination of this issue is perfunctory. And, like the BBC, by placing the fulcrum well off-centre, she fails to provide balance.

A fairer analysis might have presented the case for hunting made by the philosopher Roger Scruton: “If it is true, as I believe, that the fox is better served by hunting than by any other form of cull, and that all rival practices expose him to far more suffering, then it is not just permissible to hunt, but morally right.”

Instead, Jones uses an animal rights trope about hunting being “no different from badger baiting or dog fighting”, when she interviews an anonymous witness who comes out with the kind of narrative BBC producers appear to seek. Trail hunting is a good alternative; hunts are breaking the law; hunting will probably be finished altogether in around five years.

The case against veganism isn’t really explored either – that unscrupulous corporate capitalists are conning us about the environmental benefits and harming health (Jones admits she’s undecided herself). There is a ritual search for BAME and LGBT farmers to interview and the enervating idea of every farmer doing diversity training is introduced.

Jones unconsciously uses postmodernist expressions like “sharing their truth”, but that, for many rural folk, goes to the heart of the problem. The perspectives of the BBC presenter class have on occasion been found not to be truth as those of us who still cleave to Enlightenment values understand it.

These “boomerish” gripes apart, Divide is well written and thought-provoking. And Jones is on surer ground when talking about farming and the environment; there is an excellent discussion about regenerative farming. At the end of the book, she goes through another rite of passage, moving back to the country. We sense her life coming full circle and her views possibly starting to change again. I do hope so – or the divide may widen further.

Divide is published by Kyle Books at £16.99. To order your copy call 0844 871 1514 or visit the Telegraph Bookshop. Jamie Blackett’s Land of Milk and Honey: Digressions of a Rural Dissident (Quiller, £20) is out in June