SamCam’s idea of cooking is a jar of Hellmann’s says Miriam
MIRIAM Clegg has revealed that she refused to cook for George Osborne and was shocked when Samantha Cameron served her mayonnaise out of a jar.
Nick Clegg’s Spanish wife jokes about the food habits of Britain’s political elite in her autobiography Made In Spain: Recipes And Stories From My Country And Beyond.
She says that during one lunch in Downing Street, Mrs Cameron served roast chicken on a board with Hellmann’s mayonnaise and a box of Maldon salt.
Mrs Clegg was taken aback. She writes: ‘Now that I’ve spent years observing how grand people live, I’ve learned that the ultimate grand person’s food, found on all the most upper-class tables, is not caviar, truffles, virgin olive oil or fancy cheese. No, it is… Hellmann’s mayonnaise.’
Her book offers an insight into everyday life during the Coalition years.
In one incident, an unnamed minister who came for supper with the Cleggs’ spilt gazpacho down his shirt front but pretended nothing was wrong.
And when George Osborne first visited her husband to talk about policy, Mrs Clegg refused to cook – or even be in the house with him. Her husband was forced to order a Thai takeaway instead. Lawyer Mrs Clegg, 48, said she always refused to play the political game when her husband was in power. In an interview with The Mail on Sunday’s You magazine, she admitted: ‘I don’t find the establishment impressive. So I must have been a disaster. They must have thought “difficult woman”.’
In her book she says that during the fiveyears of the Coalition she refused to stay at Chequers with the Camerons and that there was no real ‘friendship’ between the two families. The Camerons and Cleggs dined together on only three occasions, twice at the Camerons’ Downing Street flat and once at the Cleggs’ house in Putney, South West London.
On the night Mrs Clegg hosted, she cooked sea bass – but the Camerons struggled to pick their way through the bones.
The book grew out of a blog she has been writing for four years with her three sons, Antonio, 14, Alberto, 12, and Miguel, seven.
She writes: ‘I have cooked and stirred thinking about what Nick being in politics would mean to our children.
‘I have chopped and bashed thinking what I would tell some politicians and journalists if I had the chance; I have kneaded and proved trying to find the patience required to keep my mouth shut.’