Recipes for disaster: David Cameron's Cornish pasty
3 min read
It’s said that to be a minister in the Home Office is to have an entire staff under you working on things that will force you to resign. But if you think things are any better at the Treasury, you’ve got a lot to learn.
In 2012, George Osborne delivered his third Budget. We can only guess at how he hoped it would be remembered, but not in his worst nightmares would it have been with the nickname it quickly got: The Omnishambles Budget.
Every year, as the Budget scorecard is drawn up, teams of civil servants bring along their pet projects. Viable ones are known as “starters”, and get costed. Even if they’re rejected as politically daft, they never die. They go back into a drawer to be offered to the next chancellor. This will raise a bit of cash, they’ll say, and no one will notice. And if you’re not very careful, a couple of months later you’ll be answering questions about the last time you ate a Cornish pasty, and you won’t know why.
In 2012, George Osborne was looking for ways to simplify taxation. And by good fortune, Treasury officials had plenty of ideas. For instance, it was obviously mad that some hot food attracted VAT and some didn’t. A toasted sandwich was subject to 20 per cent tax. But a warm sausage roll wasn’t. Where was the logic or justice in that?
The reason was that the sausage rolls in bakeries were deemed to be warm because they’d just been cooked, just like bread when it comes out of the oven. You wouldn’t call fresh bread hot food, so neither is a sausage roll. Even though some of those seemed to take a very long time to cool down, perhaps because they had been left under heat lamps.
It was an easy piece of simplification and it would bring in some money. Everyone would be a winner. Well, not everyone, but what were the losers going to do? Get VAT regulations relating to food temperature relative to ambient weather onto the front page of The Sun?
“WHO VAT ALL THE PIES?” asked Britain’s leading tabloid in the days that followed. “LET THEM EAT COLD PASTY. Osborne tells skint Brits to shun hot food.”
It turned out that the nation’s pie sellers, and indeed, consumers, are a powerful lobby. Appearing before the Treasury Committee, the chancellor found himself confronted by John Mann about the last time he’d bought a pasty from Greggs. “I can’t remember,” he replied, rolling his eyes wearily.
David Cameron, displaying the cunning political nous that had taken him to the top of politics, was not so easily ambushed. “I’m a pasty-eater myself,” he told a press conference. “I think the last one I bought was from the West Cornwall Pasty Company. I seem to remember I was in Leeds station at the time and the choice was whether to have one of their small ones or one of their large ones. I have got a feeling I opted for the large one, and very good it was too.”
Alas! Crack investigative reporters established that this outlet had closed years earlier. Cameron’s team counter-briefed that frankly no one could tell the prime minister, locked in a permanent battle with his waistline, anything about hot snacks.
In the absence of evidence that anyone involved in this story actually consumed a pasty, I haven’t done so either. Instead, I’ll offer a piece of advice to ministers newly installed in the Treasury: the next time an official offers you a clever idea that will raise money without anyone noticing, ask yourself if there might have been a good reason your predecessors rejected it. Maybe while munching a pasty.
