How I dined on 4p-a-bowl porridge... with Baroness who said poor can’t cook
AH, you’ve come for some Marie Antoinette budgeting tips,’ says Anne Jenkin as she greets me at the door of her home in South London. Sure enough, two small homemade jam cakes straight from the oven are on the table as I enter her kitchen.
She can smile about it now, but only just. In fact, I have come for one of her now-famous 4p porridge breakfasts. Four days earlier, Baroness Jenkin of Kennington sparked a major political row after declaring ‘the poor can’t cook’ at a Commons press conference.
Digging an even deeper hole, she added insult to injury by saying she had had a bowl of porridge costing 4p that very morning, so much better value than ‘a bowl of sugary cereals which will cost you 25p’. It wasn’t just the patronising way it sounded.
It was who said it, a Baroness not from one Tory dynasty, but two.
A year’s hard work of research
I had death threats. It was deeply unpleasant
into hunger and food banks by a Parliamentary group sponsored by the Archbishop of Canterbury no less – sitting right next to Jenkin when she put her Size Six feet in her mouth – went straight into the anaerobic food incinerator.
‘The world went mad,’ she says. ‘I had death threats. “Where does she live? Let’s go and get her,” that kind of thing.
‘The eye of the storm is a deeply unpleasant place to be.’
In self-flagellating mood, she reads aloud one letter: ‘You are callous, disgusting, bloody nasty and should be stripped of your title.’
Jenkin relives her blunder in agonising slow motion.
‘I meant to say everyone we met at food banks told us how they wished we had not lost traditional cooking skills. But I hadn’t written it down and somehow it came out as “poor people can’t cook”. Then I mentioned my 4p porridge.
‘I couldn’t believe it, we had produced a report with 78 recommendations and those four words became the story.’
She went ahead with a long-scheduled House of Lords speech on world poverty the next day, but was so shaken, she removed the word ‘poor’ from every section to avoid further ridicule. But it requires more than that to take the fizz out of Jenkin, a bundle of energy and fun – as she demonstrated by agreeing to cook porridge for me at her Kennington home. And far from eating her words, so to speak, she even produced a three-course dinner menu for The Mail on Sunday, that costs just 57p a head.
They don’t come more High Tory than Anne. Husband, Conservative MP Bernard Jenkin is the son of Thatcher-era Cabinet Minister Patrick Jenkin. Her grandfather was the 1st Viscount Davidson.
She went out with film-maker Richard Curtis at Oxford before marrying Bernard. Curtis got playful revenge by planting a wallyish character called Bernard in most of his films, including Love Actually.
A mother of two grown-up sons, she is the kind of Tory MP’s wife who went out of fashion years ago: She believes, having been born into privilege, it is her duty to give something back.
Good housekeeping and plain speaking are in her blood. Her grandmother, Tory MP Joan Davidson got into trouble in the 1940s for saying: ‘I feed my children on bread and dripping.’
Jenkin says: ‘She got the same bucketload over that as I did.’
For all her wealth, no one can say Baroness Jenkin does not know her onions when it comes to living on the breadline. Every year she takes part in a Live Below The Line campaign, living on a pound a day for a week to draw attention to hunger in the Third World.
She is no blue-rinsed dinosaur and helped David Cameron recruit more women Tory MPs via her successful Women2Win group.
The Twitter trolls are noisy, but not in the majority.
A Geordie probation officer wrote to her, expressing his disgust at seeing layabout couples on benefits ‘hanging around outside courts all day in the sunshine eating steak and chips and drinking bottles of [light perry] Lambrini while stuffing “Greggs dummies” [sausage rolls or pasties] in the mouths of babies in top-of-the-range buggies’.
Former Labour Commons Speaker Baroness Betty Boothroyd congratulated her. ‘Betty told me “you’re completely right” and that when she grew up, every week they would get “a ninepenny rabbit” for supper at the end of market day.’
Gaining confidence, Jenkin says: ‘I looked up the dictionary definition of poor. It is “lacking sufficient money to live at a standard considered comfortable or normal in a society.”’ It’s as close as saying ‘I was right’ as she will go.
Naive maybe, hypocrite no. As she prepares a bowl of her 4p porridge with oats from Aldi cooked in water, she makes a cup of filter coffee, using folded paper towels as a filter, not dearer, shop-bought filters.
She scrounged her coffee mugs.
I thought: I’m not crawling away to hide under a duvet
‘Got them from a skip,’ she declares with a bargain-hunter’s pride. ‘I was at a conference and they said it was cheaper for them to throw them away than wash them up!’
Jenkin freely admits her political shortcomings. ‘I’m an amateur in a pro’s game. That’s why I made a cock-up. If I hadn’t had so much support from friends and others, I would have crawled under the duvet.
‘Then I thought: I’m not hiding under a tin hat, I’m going to go out there and say what I believe: Why it’s crazy that families throw away £40 worth of food a month, supermarkets throw away 68 per cent of salad bags and fields full of edible food are chucked because they look wonky.
‘I regret being so clumsy, but let’s face it, if I hadn’t, you wouldn’t be here listening to me talking about the scandal of food waste, would you?’
Or eating a 4p bowl of Aldi porridge with a spoonful of Aldi honey. Not bad, although I confess I prefer mine with decadent Waitrose raspberries and Greek yoghurt at 40p per bowl – and rising.
It’s not on the menu in Anne’s kitchen. Her ‘poor can’t cook’ blunder took the shine off her 59th birthday on the day the food banks report was launched. Friends handed her a birthday cake for a Westminster celebration but she got one of them to carry it, in case she was spotted.
‘I couldn’t risk any “let them eat cake” comments, could I?’