Recipes for disaster: George Osborne's Byron Burger
3 min read
“Putting the final touches to the speech,” George Osborne, or someone in control of his Twitter account, typed.
“#SR2013”. Ah yes, who can forget #SR2013? Wasn’t that the year Daft Punk headlined? No, wait, hang on. He was talking about the spending review of June 2013.
It seems unlikely that #SR2013 was ever trending, even on the day the then-chancellor of the Exchequer set out his plans. These events do not set social media on fire. What did get people talking that day was something neither dry nor technical: the photo that illustrated Osborne’s tweet.
In his shirtsleeves, the chancellor was sitting at a conference table with his speech in front of him and a burger and chips. It was not a flattering photo, taken over Osborne’s shoulders with his hands hovering over the food as though he would really be more comfortable if someone just handed him a knife and fork. But that wasn’t the most controversial thing about it. That was when the nation’s finest investigators established that the chancellor was munching a Byron burger.
Much like Osborne, Byron was the coming thing in 2013. The firm was part of the wave of “posh patty” joints sweeping the UK. The company peaked in 2016 – again, much like Osborne – with outlets nationwide. And much like Osborne, it subsequently ran into trouble. Where he was undone by his passionate campaigning against Brexit, which alienated him from his party, for Byron it was lockdown.
The chancellor’s choice of meal was a big story. The Sun put it on its front page, under the headline “SHAMBURGER: Man of the People Blunder”. He was eating from a restaurant that charged seven times as much as McDonald’s, and he was doing it as he prepared to announce £11.5bn of spending cuts. Flailing as he tried to dig himself out of this hole, the chancellor claimed that he’d only ordered from Byron because McDonald’s didn’t deliver. But Byron didn’t deliver either: in Pulitzer-level journalism, we learned Osborne’s team had picked up the meal from Waterloo station, passing, as The Sun explained with visual aids, a number of golden arches on the way.
Somehow, it got worse. In his speech, Osborne had described his cabinet colleague Eric Pickles as a “model of lean government”. Taking an opportunity for revenge, the then-communities secretary posted a picture of himself eating a salad while working on a speech. Sick burn, as they say in DCLG.
Osborne’s hope had been to show that he was just a regular guy, doing regular things. “The point about Twitter,” he explained plaintively, “is to try and tell people more about what you’re doing every day, and there I am working late on my speech, and I’ve got a takeaway hamburger, but it puts you on the front page of The Sun.”
And that brings us to the point here, a lesson that should be scratched into the phone screen of every politician: You Do Not Have To Post.
In 2013, Osborne was the chancellor of the Exchequer. There was only one more step on the ladder, and a strong Twitter game was not going to be the thing that got Osborne onto it.
You can make a case that the thing that would stop Osborne becoming prime minister was on the table in front of him. It wasn’t his dinner, it was the speech setting out plans for massive welfare cuts that would kick in just as the government held a referendum that was, in part, a popularity contest. That, not the tasty burger, would turn out to be the really memorable part of #SR2013.
