It is said that, in the famous UK election of 1880, Lord Beaconsfield’s great error was to eat pie and mash with a spoon. William Gladstone’s earlier faux pas involving the application of French mustard to the “Midlothian pork pie” was forgotten and the old warrior rode home in triumph.
None of this is true. Of course it’s not. British democracy had its limitations in the late Victorian era. Only Old Harrovians in possession of a portcullis were entitled to vote, and rotten boroughs were still available for sale in the Army and Navy Store. But elections weren’t determined on how a chap attacked picnic food. That would have been beyond the imaginings of the most jaundiced satirist.
Let's not get carried away. Sandwiches and kitchens are not the only issues under discussion in the current UK election (arguably the most competitive since February 1974). It just feels that way.
You could almost taste the wave of relief emanating from Labour Party HQ when David Cameron was, last week, photographed eating a hot dog with a knife and fork. The frankfurter is placed in a roll for a reason, you putty-headed posho. No man who fails to grasp the dynamics of informal al fresco dining can be expected to appreciate the needs of the poor. Do I have that right?
Cameron's error would have made less noise if it did not follow that notorious encounter between Ed Milliband and a bacon sandwich. The Labour leader is from a slightly less snooty background than the Etonian Cameron – his dad was a Marxist academic and he attended an upmarket north London comprehensive – but, somehow or other, Ed's every move contrives to suggest non-bloke otherness. The photograph of him eating the sandwich tells us nothing worth knowing. Caught at an unfortunate moment, mouth pursed in preparation for mastication, he was merely a victim of unfortunate timing.
Proletarian snack
It was the juxtaposition of that arch proletarian snack – favoured by proverbial lorry drivers – with the awkward pout that gave the image such currency. Look at Ed. No man so uncomfortable in the presence of a sarnie can connect with “ordinary working families”. And so on.
The deadly business of the sandwich eventually gave way to an equally absurd argument about the ordinariness (or otherwise) of the Miliband kitchen. The story is longer than it should be, but the gist can be summed up in a few sentences. Ed and his wife clutch mugs in a humble kitchen for a photo opportunity. A Daily Mail columnist says its spartan nature reflects the couple's Menshevik joylessness. A family friend points out that this is the smaller of their two kitchens. This only makes things worse. Now, calling up memories of John Prescott's two Jaguars, the press tries out "Two Kitchens Miliband" as sobriquet of the week.
HP sauce
It would be comforting to say that this is a new phenomenon. It is not. Fifty years ago, Harold Wilson, the crafty, faux-prole Labour leader, made it his business to be photographed with
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on the dinner table. In public he smoked a pipe, but, once safely behind doors, the distinguished Oxonian academic turned back to cigars. I can still remember – such things were frowned upon in our house – seeing footage of the future Lord Wilson of Rievaulx removing the top of his egg
with a knife
. He could hardly have made a more explicit gesture of northern ordinariness if he had brought ferrets into Downing Street. (Meanwhile, Edward Heath, son to a carpenter and a maid, conducted orchestras and adopted the strangled vowels of the grouse moor.)
William Hague, Conservative leader in the 2000s, boasted about drinking 14 pints a day while working on a summer job. Tony Blair played keepie uppie with Kevin Keegan.
The indestructible British obsession with class has much to do with this. But there is something more irritating going on. The word "ordinary" and its derivatives have appeared repeatedly in the paragraphs above. The fight back against upper-class political dominance that Wilson exploited in the 1960s was something to be celebrated. It has, however, now mutated into a resistance to any sort of eccentricity or originality. Cameron, despite an even more privileged upbringing, is regarded as more "ordinary" than Miliband because (occasional aberrations with hot dogs noted) he is better at eating publicly and pretending to like Radiohead.
Why should the people who lead us be ordinary? We’re ordinary and many of us are making pigs’ ears of our lives. The more diverse and inclusive our parliaments become, the less at home they will become to “ordinary” medians of personality. Those clutching the reins of power should be extraordinary.
The bacon sandwich doesn’t matter. The fact that some people care about it matters just a bit.