Recipes For Disaster: The Bacon Sandwich
3 min read
To launch a new column on politicians making a meal of it, there was only one place to start.
“Me and politics, I don’t have a clue,” says 27-year-old Jada Mehmet. She works in her mum’s café in New Covent Garden Flower Market in south west London, starting every morning at 4am. She wasn’t here on the morning that Ed Miliband dropped in for breakfast 11 years ago. But despite her claims to political ignorance, she knows about it. “I just remember the photo.”
There are meals that have changed history. Alexander Hamilton sitting down with James Madison in 1790. Tony Blair baffling Gordon Brown with polenta at an Islington restaurant in 1994. But there is no more memorable moment of British political munching than Miliband’s decision to grab breakfast on a campaign stop in May 2014.
He’d been at the market to meet traders and been photographed buying roses for his wife Justine. The message: this was a man who rose before dawn to hear the concerns of hard-working people and still found time keep his marriage alive. The assessment of Evening Standard photographer Jeremy Selwyn: “a very boring photocall”.
His next stop was the market cafe. Press chief Bob Roberts, a former Daily Mirror political editor with a keen sense of danger, warned him not to eat on camera. Miliband, a former Treasury special adviser with a touching faith in the decency of his fellow man, didn’t listen.
The cafe and indeed the entire market were demolished after Miliband’s visit (probably not because of it) and rebuilt.
At the new Market Café, I order a bacon sandwich on bloomer bread and take a seat. Jade brings it over: crusty bread, toasted just past the shade of Donald Trump’s face. Like Miliband, I’ve opted to add a dash of ketchup. It’s heaven.
Unfortunately, that wasn’t Miliband’s experience in 2014. Selwyn had got his camera ready as soon as he saw the Labour leader order. He had experience with Milibands and food: a few years earlier, older brother David had posed for him with a banana, with a result that Conservatives, at least, had loved. Now he was watching Ed closely. “The bacon was extremely hot,” he recalls. “He put it into his mouth and it caused him major grief.”
The Labour leader, in obvious discomfort, wrestled with the sandwich and his burned mouth, unable to remove the bacon in a dignified way. Selwyn managed to get about a dozen pictures before a Labour aide saw what was happening, grabbed the sandwich and pocketed it. Too late. “You always know when you’ve got a picture that’s worth having,” says Selwyn. The images set the internet alight. Miliband was photoshopped into everything from the Last Supper to Peppa Pig.
It was cruel. It was unfair. It was also very funny. Sometimes a photo can crystallise a thought voters already have about a politician: in this case “awkward nerd”. Miliband tried to make a virtue of his lack of elegance: “If you want a politician who thinks that a good photo is the most important thing, then don’t vote for me.” But good photos do matter. A year later, The Sun would use the image for their pre-election front page, urging readers to “Save Our Bacon”.
On the day itself, Miliband was blissfully oblivious. His adviser Lord Wood of Anfield said that as they drove on to more campaign stops, they decided against telling him he’d gone viral. “Bob and I sat in the backseat all day doomscrolling while Ed was in the front seat talking about the bullet points for his speeches.” Sometimes, a bacon sandwich can be a metaphor for someone’s entire leadership.
