Recipes for disaster: Ed Balls' eight sausage rolls
4 min read
Politicians making a meal of it. This week: eight sausage rolls for Ed Balls
“Can we get, um, eight sausage rolls, please?” Ed Balls’ visit to a branch of Greggs in Redditch was supposed to be a political masterstroke.
David Cameron’s government was going through what, at the time, seemed like a major crisis. Of course, this was 2012, and when the Big Book Of Conservative Disasters (2010-2024 Edition) comes to be written, the row about VAT on hot food will be lucky to get a paragraph. But at the time it felt like a big deal.
It was in the nature of the Omnishambles Budget that it had quite a few problems, but the most tangible one was the pasty tax. Trying to remove anomalies in the way that takeaway meals were taxed, George Osborne was accused of introducing fresh anomalies. Worse than that, although the details of the VAT change were obscure, the impact, as relayed to the public, was simple: pies would cost more.
Balls had told reporters he was carb-loading ahead of a marathon run. Was he planning to scoff all eight himself?
To further complicate matters, Osborne and Cameron were enmeshed in a row about their own consumption of yellow foodstuffs. The chancellor couldn’t remember the last time he’d bought a Cornish pasty. The prime minister said he could, but the veracity of his account was under question.
With The Sun leading on the story and The Telegraph running a liveblog, Labour decided to seize the moment. They would show that, unlike the oddballs running the country, their party was led by people who could buy food without looking weird. Which was why Ed Balls was asking for eight sausage rolls.
“Eight?” asked the woman behind the counter. It was an unusual day for her, with a camera crew in her shop and a man she may or may not have recognised as the brains behind Bank of England independence ordering a tray load of savoury snacks without giving any thought to possibilities offered by a meal deal.
“Eight,” confirmed Balls, with the air of a man who had been quite a big noise in the Treasury and could count significantly higher than this. Behind him Ed Miliband smiled nervously, and Rachel Reeves looked around with the fascinated air of someone who that morning could not have told you that either Redditch or Greggs even existed.
Outside, Miliband told a TV crew that the pasty tax showed the government to be “out of touch”. This was supposed to be the message of the visit. But viewers had a bigger question: how were he, Balls and Reeves going to split up eight pastries? Balls had told reporters he was carb-loading ahead of a marathon run. Was he planning to scoff all eight himself?
A warm Greggs sausage roll is one of life’s simple, if guilty, pleasures: soft flaky pastry around a tasty centre. Eight of them, on the other hand, is definitely too much of a good thing.
There was an explanation: before getting out of the car to buy lunch, Balls had asked his team if anyone else fancied a sausage roll. A lot of hands had gone up. This was how he’d got to eight.
But looking weird wasn’t the biggest problem. Fun though it was for everyone to laugh at Cameron and Osborne, the pasty tax had nothing to do with Labour’s fundamental message on Conservative economic policy. It was a distraction, and oppositions struggling for public attention can’t afford to be distracted.
The Omnishambles Budget wasn’t the beginning of the end for the Cameron government, and accusing the prime minister of being out of touch didn’t win voters to Labour. The affair made Labour feel good for a while, but it didn’t do them any good. Much like eating eight sausage rolls.
