Masterchef star: May wouldn’t axe free school lunches if she was a mother
A FORMER MasterChef winner has claimed Theresa May would not have scrapped free school lunches if she had children.
Thomasina Miers said it was ‘extraordinary’ that the policy will be ‘chucked out’ by the Conservatives.
The party plans to end free lunches to free up £4billion of funding for schools.
However, mother-of-two Mrs Miers risked making the attack personal by bringing up the sensitive issue of Mrs May’s lack of children.
There was a storm when the PM was targeted by former energy minister Andrea Leadsom during last year’s Tory leadership contest.
Mrs Leadsom suggested she had a bigger stake in the country’s future because she was a mother, but was later forced to apologise and said she had not meant to cause offence.
Mrs Miers, 41, admitted mentioning children had been a ‘difficult thing to say’ but felt she had to speak out over the Tory plans, which were revealed in the Conservative manifesto this month.
Speaking at the Hay Festival, the 2005 MasterChef champion said: ‘ I felt like, wow, that’s really interesting, because she had that whole deal with Andrea Leadsom making that comment about, “well you don’t have children”, that was quite a thing to say – but part of me felt that if you had had children would you have done that?
‘Because it is so important that our children eat. It is a difficult thing to say, and I hesitated before saying it, but I kind of felt that this ... was a very important food bill and having children makes you think a lot about food is marketed to children, and how you feed your own children, and what I found baffling was how it got kicked out so quickly.’
The free lunch policy was spearheaded by Nick Clegg when he was deputy prime minister in the coalition gov- ernment and is estimated to cost £650 a year per pupil.
The Tory manifesto pledge commits to giving primary school children a breakfast, while the poorest will still get lunch. Mrs Miers was being interviewed by journalist Rosie Boycott at the festival on Sunday night.
Claiming it was ‘depressing’ that lunch is not considered to be important by Mrs May, she said: ‘How can it not be important for kids to sit down together? For many of these children, that is their only proper meal of the day.
‘The head of the school that my eldest attends said she worries about the school holidays, and she has kids on watch lists because they come back more malnourished than at the beginning.’
She added: ‘I feel this stranglehold that the big supermarkets have on our food system is not helping, people have to have access to fresh fruit and vegetables. It is mad that they don’t.’
Last year the Prime Minister talked about her struggle to have children, adding: ‘It just didn’t happen.’ On BBC’s The One Show earlier this month the PM revealed how a newspaper wrongly claimed she had ‘a new baby’.
Mrs Miers has presented cookery shows on Channel 4 and Channel 5 and written a series of books. She opened the first restaurant in her Mexican street food chain, Wahaca, in 2007.
‘How can it not be important?’