Why ARE Tories savaged for giving the same money saving advice as the pious Left?
GEORGE EUSTICE made a right meal of offering advice to families on a budget who are struggling with the cost of living crisis. The Environment Secretary put a peg on his nose and suggested the poors should buy value-brand pasta to save money on the weekly food shop.
For this impertinence, he was treated with the usual contempt by Nick Robinson on Wednesday’s edition of the Today programme. ‘There is a danger,’ suggested the presenter silkily, ‘that you’re insulting people’s intelligence.’
‘I don’t think that’s right at all,’ said Mr Eustice, but no one was listening. The following morning, he was the subject of two bruising newspaper front pages. ‘Let Them Eat Cheap Pasta,’ screamed one headline. ‘Let Them Eat Value Brand Cake,’ read another.
The hashtag #ToryBudgetingTips started trending on Twitter, where tweets included suggestions to lower energy bills by ‘turning down the heating on the servant wing’ and ‘get nanny to bake you a spiffing cake if you can’t afford food’.
A thunderhead of fury gathered about a government minister advising hard-up families to buy low-cost food — but why?
When cookbook author and selfstyled poverty campaigner Jack Monroe suggests exactly the same thing, she is hailed as a heroine of the people. For a long time, Jack has recommended the Asda Smart Price range of produce — recently rebranded as Just Essentials By Asda — and no one has thrown their budget num-nums out of the pram at her audacity.
In her best-selling book Cooking On A Bootstrap (£15.99, just saying) she also informs her readers that ‘value-range cheeses are excellent’, and no one felt patronised. Can you imagine the outrage if poor old George had suggested the same thing? He’d be in meltdown, no matter how Caerphilly he chose his words.
Let them make risotto with cheaper long-grain rather than arborio rice? Let them use rapeseed instead of olive oil in their cooking, and ingest thy vitamins via frozen greens instead of fresh? Outrage! People would be egging George in the street — except they wouldn’t, because who can afford to waste an egg?
Jack Monroe has suggested all these things and more (shop for value-brand stock cubes, she urges, use black tea instead of red wine to flavour stews) and there hasn’t been a cheep about her championing of cheap.
The same applies to Martin Lewis. When he advises people how to cut costs he is called ‘The Money Saving Expert’ and gets a TV show and a CBE for his troubles — but God forbid a Conservative politician, albeit a bumbling one, should try to help out.
Much the same thing happened back in 2014 when Baroness Jenkin of Kennington was pilloried after declaring ‘the poor can’t cook’ at a Commons Press conference. She had spent a year as part of a parliamentary group researching hunger and food banks, where people frequently told her they regretted that traditional cooking skills were being lost.
She compounded her sin by saying that she’d had a bowl of porridge costing 4p that very morning, which was so much better value than ‘a bowl of sugary cereals which will cost you 25p’.
All of this was, and is, incontestably, demonstrably true — and nothing Jamie Oliver hadn’t said before. But, of course, no one got their turkey in a twizzler about him, or demanded he should be sacked.
The Baroness survived and so will George Eustice, but it is another example of the Tory taint infecting society. It’s infantilising and infuriating, but there are those who will insist on making political capital by fostering the cartoonish notion that the Conservatives are all filthy-rich autocrats who throw peasants on the fire to cook their wagyu rib roasts.
Some even insist they were enjoying parties while hundreds were dying of Covid, because they don’t care about ordinary folk and the rules don’t apply to them anyway — fancy that.
Yes, having Boris in charge rather plays into their hands; just look at him, bumbling around, wallpapering his pantry with gold leaf, not knowing who Lorraine is, seemingly unsympathetic to pensioners worried about heating bills: the mistakes are endless.
And it doesn’t help that George Eustice is not a natural magnet for sympathy. He is a former PR man who once stood as a Ukip candidate, a politician who campaigned for stricter Press regulation because the newspapers kept calling him Useless Eustice.
BUT what is most objectionable is that his words have been dismissed not because of what he said but because of who he is — a Conservative politician daring to speak on such matters as domestic household budgets. Yet Eustice is not an old Etonian who spent his youth hosing vintage champagne up his friends’ bottoms and fine-dining his way through Oxford.
He grew up on his father’s fruit farm in Cornwall — and worked on it for many years. In his budgetrange recommendations, he may have been stating the obvious, but if that were a crime, all politicians would be doing time.
Perhaps it is only the Brits, with their twin obsessions of class and perceived privilege, who could make such a meal of value beans and chips on shoulders.