The Daily Telegraph

If you get called ‘gammon’, you’re probably doing something right

- read more at telegraph.co.uk/opinion michael henderson

Gammon is the foundation of a jolly good dish. You can eat it with fried eggs, or with chips and peas. You can include it in a mixed grill. The addition of pineapple is a bit feeble, admittedly, but few people do that these days. And you can scoff it at any time of the day. It is a most versatile resource.

“Gammon” is also the current insult of choice of the young, metropolit­an smarties who, being virtuous, believe they will inherit the earth. Red faces, you see, denoting anger and a general horror of the modern world as those middle-aged reactionar­ies interpret it in their provincial towns and hamlets. To go with all those red trousers.

They play rugby union and golf, these folk, games which mark them down as frightful old fools. They hold broadly conservati­ve views on things like the economy, immigratio­n and the European Union. They drink ale in snug bars, and tend not to hug friends, never mind strangers.

If they are reactionar­y, you have to say they have plenty to react against, as those who dub them “gammon” will assuredly discover when they grow out of short trousers.

Life is never easier when you have few responsibi­lities. Our universiti­es are fuller than ever of young people who rejoice in values like tolerance and diversity, unless others have the brass neck to disagree. Some words of VS Naipaul may be useful here: “We used borrowed phrases which were part of the escape from thought.” Naipaul was writing about radical anti-colonial politician­s who were striving to create a brave new world they did not fully comprehend.

Rather like those who use “gammon” as an insult, then. One day, when the fever has passed, most will look back on those youthful days when they thought Jeremy Corbyn was a symbol of liberation and not a dim minor public school boy with a sense of stupefacti­on. Most people grow up, eventually. It just takes some longer than others.

A few, it is true, continue to wear short trousers in middle age. Paul Mason, the foghorn-voiced revolution­ary from the East Lancs Road, probably sleeps in his, ready to leap out of bed when the trumpets proclaim the dawn of the new dispensati­on when all the unbeliever­s are summoned to account for their thoughtcri­mes.

What sort of grub do the anti-gammoners wolf down to fire themselves up? Does Zoe Williams, who commended the protesters who spat at delegates to the Tory conference in Manchester in 2015, settle down to the roast beef of old England? More like a plate of lentils in raspberry coulis. Owen Jones makes do with a bowl of rusks. He’s never angry, the boy Jones. The light of life illuminate­s his teenage soul.

We can all make generalisa­tions to suit our views. But not all middleaged men in the shires are red-faced with anger. Most try to get on with the business of living, which is not always as easy as their young urban detractors imagine. If we prick them, do they not bleed?

The gammon brigade should wear the insult as a badge of honour. Not the wizened old bigots, of whom there are a few. But those men and women who are not quite as desperate for the approval of trendy Londoners as the trendies think they should be. As many a red-faced squire has told an impertinen­t pipsqueak: “Bugger orf!”

Gammon: it’s wholesome and unpretenti­ous. Unlike some other dishes, and people, one might name.

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