A Sandwich Short of a Picnic

Of all the things to command politics attention on Thursday, it was Kemi Badenoch's remarks about sandwiches. In an interview with The Spectator, the Tory leader went on the record with gems like "lunch is for wimps", and decried sandwiches as "not real food". Always looking for opportunities to establish his authenticity, Keir Starmer rejoined, arguing that the sandwich is a "great British institution". Badenoch was later asked if she might indulge a turkey sarnie on Boxing Day, to which she replied "maybe a turkey pie". It's impossible to distinguish between silly season and the every day operation of mainstream politics.

This is another Badenoch gaffe. Though, remember, the Tory leader doesn't misspeak because she thinks carefully about everything she says. Which makes it worse. Obviously, a limp and alienating effort looking tough considering millions of people enjoy their lunch breaks as respite from the nonsense of the working day, and many of them will be chomping on sandwiches. Overpriced and misnamed "meal deals" or the lunch box with home-assembled fare is normal. Going out for a steak, like Badenoch apparently does, is not. For Starmer strategists bereft of ideas save tributing the right, Badenoch is the ghost of Christmases to come. Every time she says something, whether it's Prime Minister's Questions or in press interviews, she generously pours gifts down Labour's chimney. A Conservative leader who gives things away, what a novelty.

Have the Tories completely lost their minds? This place has long suggested that a lurch to the right isn't mad when they're in competition with an extreme right alternative that's breathing down their necks. But food wars, really? It only makes sense when you see what Reform have been up to lately. Their spokesperson for beating up women, Rupert Lowe, has has jumped on the conspiracy bandwagon about the cow feed additive, Bovear. A supplement that suppresses certain enzymes in a cows' gut to reduce methane emissions, he said he won't be consuming milk from Bovear-fed cattle because he likes it "natural". Someone give Lowe raw milk and see how he gets on. Nigel Farage followed this up with a TikTok where he attacked oat milk and skimmed milk, because they're left wing. Badenoch's attack on a lunch time staple, in this context, reads as a weird attempt at one-upping her Reform nemesis.

While this has been going on, her more significant and more sinister comments have got unremarked upon. Asked about her Nigerian origins, Badenoch said "I have nothing in common with the people from the north of the country, the Boko Haram where the Islamism is, those were our ethnic enemies and yet you end up being lumped in with those people." Perhaps she thought southern chauvinism and snobbery, transplanted from Nigeria to London/South East-centric politics, would delight the Tory base. Or felt her conference season "outburst" against "invalid cultures" required reinforcement via a bald stating her racialised antipathy to Islam. Or just the typical expression of an arrogance that speaks to her class privilege and hatred of the poor, combined with an animosity rooted in north Nigerians' rejection of and resistance to the southern-centric state. Some might be impressed, including Labour staffers who'll welcome another early present.

Have we learned anything from Badenoch's exercise in culinary cringe? Nothing new. She's reconfirmed her political flat footedness, cluelessness, and outright estrangement from the lives of millions of people. It's difficult even to see how this might turn the heads of the Reform-curious, so out there are her interventions. If she carries on as she has been doing, it's not only Starmer who'll have an easy time of it. So will Farage and his growing operation.