Recipes for disaster: David Cameron v chocolate oranges
3 min read
The Conservative Party, defeated at Labour’s hands, had elected a new, young leader who was determined to create distance with the failures of the past.
This was a leader who wasn’t afraid to take on the old orthodoxies, and even to pick fights with traditional allies. A leader who knew that sometimes the point is to have a public fight. Which is why David Cameron went to war with chocolate oranges.
It was the first week of January 2006, a time when people pulling on their clothes for work are aware that their waistlines have expanded over the Christmas break, and when they resolve that this will be the year they actually go to the gym. So, the Tory leader had the wind behind him when he blamed companies for making these resolutions that bit harder to keep.
“Try to buy a newspaper at the train station and, as you queue to pay, you’re surrounded by cut-price offers for giant chocolate bars,” Cameron said in a speech that leaves you nostalgic for a time when the worst example of capitalism anyone could come up with was confectionary. Or when anyone might try to buy a newspaper. “As Britain faces an obesity crisis, why does WHSmith promote half-price chocolate oranges at its checkouts instead of real oranges?”
Many reasons, Dave. Have you tried eating a real orange on a crowded commuter train? The Labour government sneered. Was the leader of the opposition really trying to rebrand himself as a mere health campaigner? Six years later, Ed Miliband told this very magazine that the speech was an example of Cameron’s failure: “If he can’t sort out the chocolate orange, he’s not going to sort out the train companies, the energy companies, the banks, is he?”
This was to miss the point. By 2012, Cameron was prime minister, and the very fact that Miliband was citing his speech was a sign of its success. As Miliband was learning, it’s difficult to do anything as leader of the opposition that anyone notices at the time, let alone remembers years later – although he would go on to manage one food-related incident of his own.
In fact, like a chocolate orange, Cameron’s speech was brilliantly conceived to appeal to its target market. His goal was to show that this wasn’t your grandad’s Conservative Party. The days of slavishly taking the line from the CBI were gone. Now he was going to call out irresponsible capitalism. More than that, the Conservatives were going to address themselves to the real concerns of voters, rather than endlessly banging on about Europe.
Did it work? Obviously the Europe bit didn’t. WHSmith did briefly offer fresh fruit at railway stations, but it turned out that crisps and chocs are what the public wants, and fresh produce is a problem to stock and sell. The rebrand worked, however. While subsequent events would show that the Tory Party’s commitment to environmentalism and staying in the EU was not exactly deep, the message that the party had changed landed.
What is the lesson for Kemi Badenoch, a leader who isn’t shy of having a fight? Perhaps to decide who or what you want to have a fight with. When it came to chocolate oranges, Cameron’s was with his party’s capitalism-at-all-costs image. Then to find a vivid way to communicate that which aligns with the public mood.
But Badenoch’s position is more difficult than Cameron’s was. In his day, the electorate was in three chunks. These days it comes in many more segments, which are harder to stick together. A bit like a chocolate orange, in fact.
