BBQ food vans for Johnsons’ wedding party
Guests of PM and his wife will sit on hay bales and eat South African-style street food at Cotswolds estate
GUESTS at Boris and Carrie Johnson’s wedding party are set to feast on a South African-style barbeque from an ecofriendly street food truck.
Preparations were well under way last night at Daylesford House, a Cotswolds country retreat, with dozens of hay bale benches and van-loads of contractors heading in and out of the giant marquee.
One of many caterers to arrive yesterday appeared to be Smoke and Braai, a small family-run business serving grass-fed locally sourced meat, aligned to Mrs Johnson’s values as an environmental campaigner.
It is understood that about a dozen Conservative MPS will be among the 200 guests who have been invited to the Gloucestershire country pile.
Sources said the guest list from Mr Johnson’s friends in Parliament increased after he resigned.
Mrs Johnson is said to be the driving force behind the party. She is working closely with Lady Bamford, the wife of Tory donor Lord Bamford, as the couple are hosting the event.
Guests have been asked to arrive for drinks at 5.30pm, with the reception set to last well into the night.
They had better turn with healthy appetites, as at least three street food vendors were seen setting up in the grounds of the estate.
Smoke and Braai infuses “Low n Slow Americana BBQ together with fire and charcoal cooking Braai”, a South African cuisine of roasting food over an open fire.
Among the items on its menu are grass-fed British beef braai boerewors rolls, masa corn tortilla tacos, smoked barbacoa lamb and ancient grain salad.
Its wooden-panelled, vintage-lit trailer appeared to be positioned near the hay bale dining area beside a row of eateries adjacent to the huge marquee.
The ethical firm was established three years ago by Simon Chiremba, based in Corby, Northampton, who attended a private school in Zimbabwe before studying culinary arts at University College Birmingham.
His recent events have included the Silverstone Grand Prix.
Much of its grass-fed meat is sourced from the nearby West Lodge Farm near
Kettering, Northamptonshire, alongside a large vegan and vegetarian offering.
At wedding parties, film crew bashes and vintage car shows served by Smoke and Braai in recent months, dishes available included lime and mint-infused pineapple, loaded BBQ skin-on fries, cherry wood-smoked pork with honey and mustard slaw, locally-sourced Aberdeen Angus ox cheeks, and woodsmoked vegan BBQ cauliflower.
“We have lived in, travelled and experienced both cultures of BBQ and Braai and one thing they all have in common is that they bring people together and make everyone happy,” Smoke and Braai says on its website.
It says its vision is to “support local farmers and communities” and “believe that we are all ultimately stronger together and we can all grow and learn from each other”.
A large gazebo has been erected at the rear of Daylesford House, a Georgian grade I listed mansion, while an orchard cut out into a heart-shape may also provide a romantic backdrop to a long overdue party.
Mr and Mrs Johnson had hoped to celebrate their wedding at Chequers, the Prime Minister’s Buckinghamshire country retreat, but the furore following his forced resignation scuppered those plans.
Lord Bamford stepped in at the 11th hour to rescue the event, providing a backdrop every bit as grand.
The couple married in a low-key private ceremony at Westminster Cathedral last year, organised in secret, in front of a small group of family and friends.
This was followed by a reception in the gardens of 10 Downing Street with a limited number of guests thanks to coronavirus curbs, but a bigger bash was always planned.
Lady Bamford set up the upmarket Daylesford Organic Farm, with a chain of shops selling its produce across London.
Gina’s flip-flops
Congratulations to Matt Hancock and his girlfriend Gina Coladangelo, below, who completed an Alpine charity trek this week, raising thousands for Cambridge’s Children’s Hospital.
The pair wanted to scale Mont Blanc but the summit was closed because of the heatwave so they walked around it instead for 100 miles over four days.
Hancock, who was said to be “a little sore” after the trek, escaped relatively unscathed, apart from aggravating an old cricket injury on his right knee. Coladangelo had less luck. “Gina ended up in her sliders because her boots fell apart with 20 miles to go,” a friend tells me. Ouch!
Let 10-year-olds vote, said Liz
Runaway favourite in the Tory leadership race Liz Truss once targeted the youth vote with a plan to give the vote to 10-year-old children. Truss argued, when she was a 19-year-old Liberal Democrat activist, that children should be able to vote at elections when they can be found criminally liable for crimes. “The age of criminal responsibility should come to us with the right to vote. Since when have measures of responsibility or intelligence been a constraint on the voting rights of adults?”, she said in a July 1994 edition of Lib-dem magazine Free Radical. Careful
Liz – you might start to give people ideas.
How Don helped Van
Veteran James Bond lyricist Don Black has been helping out Van Morrison, right, who still has music pouring out of him but finds writing lyrics increasingly onerous. “You got any lyrics for me?” the Northern Irish blues legend asked him. Black (who wrote the lyrics for five 007 songs) later gave Morrison the lyrics to three songs.
Time passed, and they bumped into one another again. “So you got any lyrics for me Don?” asked Morrison. “I gave you three songs already,” protested Black. “Oh, I’ve recorded those,” said Morrison. “You got any more?”
They’ve done 12 songs together now. This is how song writing partnerships are born.
“It’d be nice if he remembered to play them for me,” Black told me.
Farewell, Sir Christopher Meyer
So sad to hear that former diplomat Sir Christopher Meyer has died. Meyer’s far-sighted approach to politics meant he was rare among his former colleagues in the Foreign Office at being relaxed about the UK leaving the European Union. He told me on Chopper’s Politics Podcast at the height of the 2019 Brexit wars: “Maybe we should regard Parliamentary chaos as good, as a force for purging furry pipes.”
Meyer always tweeted as “Sir Socks” on social media, after the bright red socks he wore when he was our man in Washington, and for years afterwards.
He will be hugely missed.
Mind Boris’s moves
Boris Johnson is preparing to hit the dance floor at his Coviddelayed wedding party in the grounds of JCB tycoon Lord Bamford’s home in the Cotswolds tonight. The party starts at 5.30pm for cocktails and goes on late, I am told. The 200-strong guest list mainly comprises friends with around 12 MPS. I would advise guests to give the PM some space when the band starts up. One pal tells me the PM’S dancing is memorable, adding that he appears “as if he is mounting and dismounting a motorbike while revving”. Vroom, vroom Boris!
What made Priti and Ben laugh
Ben Wallace and Priti Patel were snapped roaring with laughter at the Goodwood Festival, above, this week. The pair were tipped as future leaders just weeks ago but chose not to enter in the Tory leadership race.
“They were joking about how the best race to watch was the one with the thoroughbreds,” a pal tells me.
A funny pairing
An unusual political Come Dine with Me moment recently when Peter Mandelson and Michael Gove were spotted enjoying a quiet meal in a London restaurant together.
The meal was enlivened when former Labour MP Chuka Umunna, who quit Labour to start the Change UK party, appeared.
Mandelson’s view of Change UK is well known. They “formed a new party without either policies or a leader”, he has told friends with a note of incredulity.