Saturday, December 14, 2024
Lunch is for wimps
The Mirror reports that Keir Starmer has defended sandwiches as a "great British institution" after Kemi Badenoch dismissed them as not "real food".
The paper says that Badenoch sparked a backlash after saying "lunch is for wimps" and ranting about sandwiches, telling a magazine interview that she sometimes has a steak brought to her as she works:
The PM was surprised to learn this, his official spokesman said. The sarnie clash broke out after Ms Badenoch said: "I don't think sandwiches are a real food, it's what you have for breakfast." No10 was having none of it.
Mr Starmer's spokesman said: "I think he was surprised to hear that the leader of the Opposition has a steak brought in for lunch. The Prime Minister is quite happy with a sandwich lunch."
The spokesman described the sandwich as a "great British institution" which, according to the British Sandwich Association, brings in £8 billion a year to the UK economy. Asked what the Prime Minister's favourite sandwich is, the spokesman said: "I think he enjoys a tuna sandwich and occasionally a cheese toastie."
Describing her daily routine, Ms Badenoch said: "What's a lunch break? Lunch is for wimps. I have food brought in and I work and eat at the same time." She added that she "will not touch bread if it’s moist”.
Her remarks sparked a backlash, with Good Morning Britain host Kate Garraway saying: "It's made our viewers very cross". Former Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng said: "I get where she's coming on with sandwiches because, you know, those of us we have low carb diets and all of that sort of business, but it's an individual choice.
"I don't think that's going to be a plank of the next Tory manifesto." He jokingly distanced himself from the controversial remark, saying: "I don't think she's expressing a party line or anything."
There was though an interesting take on this row in the Financial Times in which Stephen Bush says that there is a serious point:
If I were to ask, say, my grandmother — a white South African who came to the UK aged 21, heavily pregnant, because she knew that her mixed-race child (my mother) would not be able to enjoy the opportunities and freedoms she wanted for her in apartheid era South Africa — about British sandwiches, she too would use words like “moist” and would probably say it wasn’t a real food either.
And I, being a British-born mixed-race liberal, would probably say “that’s pretty weird, grandma” and think nothing more of it. Like my grandmother, Kemi Badenoch grew up in another country: she was born in the UK but spent the first 16 years of her life in Nigeria, and like my grandmother she came to this country because of politics. As Tomiwa Owolade wrote a few weeks back in an excellent column for the Times, it is impossible to understand Badenoch’s politics without understanding the upheaval and chaos of Nigeria in the 1990s.
This isn’t the first time Badenoch has said something that to most British ears might have sounded a bit odd. During the leadership election she said she “became working class” when working at McDonald's at the age of 16, having come to the UK as a result of the upheaval in Nigeria — which was suspended from the Commonwealth for violating the Harare Declaration a year earlier.
This is something I also recognise from my grandmother’s story: having got an art degree from the University of Cape Town, the only job she could get here in Britain was as a cleaner. (Whether that is because she had come from Cape Town or because of the pulling power of art degrees, I leave to you to decide.)
Now, I think that for most British people, who do not have that direct relationship to someone like Badenoch in living memory, the things she has said in interviews seem pretty weird. To most British people, the idea that you can “become working class” seems pretty foreign to most of us. That the sandwiches you buy in our supermarkets are oddly moist, again, seems pretty weird.
What Badenoch badly needs to do is find a way of talking about the fact she is a first-generation immigrant. There are, in my view, all sorts of ways that makes her a valuable addition to our politics. I am the first person in my family not to have to move countries because of politics — that is a stability that we here in the UK often take for granted, and Badenoch does not. I don’t always agree with her political positions but she is right to talk about the importance of British stability and to warn that we take it for granted at our peril. And part of what makes this country great in my view is that a first-generation immigrant can rise to become leader of the main party of the British right, as Badenoch herself has noted.
But unless she can make that a central part of her leadership pitch, she is going to be defined by interventions that to most people seem pretty odd and out of keeping with how they see politics.
Still with so many people in poverty and struggling to put a meal on the table this Christmas, one would think that our party leaders had better things to talk about.
