Recipes for Disaster: Kemi's steak
3 min read
Back in 2006, a pollster advised George Osborne that the public generally knew at most three things about any politician, and that he should think what he would like them to be.
He asked if it would make him seem more human if people knew he was learning Mandarin.
Kemi Badenoch is still introducing herself to the British public, but it’s likely that one of the things that people will remember about her is what she has for lunch. Or rather, what she doesn’t have.
Just before Christmas, she gave an interview to The Spectator. The headline on the piece was “I Will Die Protecting This Country”. That is not, sadly, the line anyone else remembered from the interview.
“I’m not a sandwich person,” she began, when asked about her lunch habits. She could have stopped there, but Badenoch has no interest in leaving thoughts unexpressed. “I don’t think sandwiches are a real food,” she went on. “It’s what you have for breakfast.”
Is it? Aren’t they? A joy of the human experience is the occasional glimpse into another’s inner life. Like learning that there are people who think that a Pret Super Club is a plausible alternative to cornflakes. Or possibly not: “I will not touch bread if it’s moist.”
So if not a sandwich, what does Badenoch lunch on? “I have food brought in and I work and eat at the same time,” she said. “Sometimes I will get a steak.”
While this conjures the image of an intern arriving at her desk with a sirloin under a silver salver, in reality she sends out to a branch of up-and-coming chain Farmer J. Lacking an intern of my own, I walked down to Broadway to eat like a 21st century Tory.
The first thing you notice is the long queue, which stretches well out of the door. But it moves fast, and you are quickly being asked to choose food. The standard meal is a base, a main and two sides, spooned onto a divided plastic tray for £12.75. I try to guess the Toriest option. It’s hard to know whether rice is less woke than spinach, but the servers are in a hurry and I settle for Farmer’s Grains – a mix of wheats – topped with steak, and have Mac’n’Cheese and sweet potato on the side. And a Coke, full-sugar, obviously.
I’m handed my food on a tin tray, and we find a seat. The ambience is Soviet Workers’ Canteen Designed By Habitat. The real Farmer J, founder Jonathan Recanati, is not a farmer as such, having previously worked in structured credit at Deutsche Bank. It feels like an appropriate place for a Conservative to eat: a decade ago Recanati was just a guy with a dream and £850,000 of investment from friends and family. Now he has 15 branches. It wouldn’t be a surprise to learn that Rishi Sunak was an investor.
The steak, it must be said, is excellent: pink on the inside, charred on the outside, ideal to polish off after a hard PMQs. The sides are tasty, even if the biodegradable cutlery and organic veg feels a touch Cameron-era Toryism.
Badenoch, sadly, disapproves of the focus on her eating habits. “I was asked: ‘What do you eat for lunch? Do you like sandwiches?’” she told Iain Dale a few weeks later. “And, no, I don’t like sandwiches. And that became a headline and a running story for about three days. I do think there’s a lot more unseriousness in politics.” We can’t wait to find out the next thing the public learns about her.
