‘Soggy bottom’ Dave’s got a lot to learn from Nadiya

ON THE evening of the last day of Tory conference the nation sat down – 14.5 million of us – to watch a young Muslim mum in a headscarf make buns, another confection (I mean ‘bake’) and a wedding cake decorated with a patriotic red, white and blue sari and Koh-i-Noor style peardrop diamonds.

We sat sofa-side only hours after David Cameron had given his leader’s speech and boasted how only the Conservatives were the party of opportunity and honest hard work, and on the same day the PM had congratulated us on the fact that not he, but we elected the first three speakers at conference: Sam Gyimah, the ‘Black British’ son of a single parent, Priti Patel, the daughter of Gujarati immigrants, and biz sec Sajid Javid, ‘whose father came here from Pakistan to drive the buses’.

He was right, by the by, to stress his multi-coloured, gender-balanced, ethnically diverse dreamboat of a government, as to any objective observer – ie, me – Manchester was a sea of white hair and sharp young men in navy suits being gobbed at by the angry mob in pig masks.

Anyway, even in the thick of it up in the Northern Powerhouse, the high command were quick to spot that the Muslim girl on the most popular show on telly, and the most watched programme of the year, was the perfect poster girl for their vaunted new, modern Nice Party.

As if to underline that Tuesday’s nastiness hadn’t been, um, baked into the party (Home Secretary Theresa May’s speech had its points, and one of them was that immigrants were wastes of space in economic terms), both the Prime Minister and the Chancellor told Nadiya, the daughter of immigrants, they were rooting for her.

DC praised her as ‘cool under pressure’ and GO tweeted: ‘Go Nadiya!’

Then Nadiya only went and won Bake Off, which was great and brand-positive, as her victory was exactly the right topping for the Tory pitch that ‘it makes no difference whether you live in the North or in the South, whether you’re black or you’re white, a man or a woman, the school you went to, the background you have, who your parents were’.

NADIYA Hussain is a British Bangladeshi, Luton-born, Leeds-based and state school-educated, so she incarnates all that, as well as the aspirational message, also from the PM, that ‘what matters is the effort you put in. And if you put the effort in you’ll have the chance to make it.’ (Nadiya practised her bakes 24/7 and even cut the tops off her sponges using a spirit level as a guide.)

Of course, as soon as she won, chippy observers said she was the PC choice and a BBC stitch-up, but we all know our Nad won fair and square. ‘I went into the tent the smallest baker at 4ft 11in, but I walked out feeling a giant,’ she said.

‘She’s a winner – she’s a champion in our eyes,’ said her husband Abdul, who, with his house-husbandly skills and creamy, cappuccino skin, became a national heart-throb, especially when he brought his whole extended family to the celebratory tea party and tweeted to his wife: ‘I love you more than cake.’

I have to admit I cried when I heard the following words on Wednesday.

‘I’m never going to put boundaries on myself ever again. I’m never going to say I can’t do it.

‘I’m never going to say maybe. I’m never going to say I don’t think I can. ‘I can and I will.’ So who said them? The man who says he still can’t help pinching himself about his surprise victory in May, and whose leader’s speech didn’t just have a soggy bottom, it was so wet you could shoot snipe off it? Or the winner of GBBO 2015?

As you guessed, it was the ‘Muslim girl in the headscarf’ with three scrumptious kids and a hot husband, and not the Prime Minister. But it could have been either.

It may be the sugar rush, but I’m thrilled that for tens of millions of us, this is England, and Nadiya – whose appearance on GBBO has taught us not to look at the headscarf but at the girl – is Britain.

Hard not to love it all more than cake.