Recipes for disaster: Nando's with The Independent Group
Chicken shop date: Our man joins Gavin Shuker for a cheeky Nando's in SW1
3 min read
Politicians making a meal of it. This week: Nando's with The Independent Group
The Independent Group, also known as Change UK, the gang of Labour and Conservative MPs who walked away from their own parties in fury in 2019, is now almost forgotten. It would make a great round in a very particular type of pub quiz. Probably one held on the parliamentary estate.
“Do you know who the first leader was?” Gavin Shuker, one of its leading members, asks me. I am stumped. I know it wasn’t Chuka Umunna, although a lot of us suspected at the time that he fancied the job. Shuker explains they weren’t going to have a leader at first, but they found that the Electoral Commission required one. They ended up picking Heidi Allen, who’d left the Tories over Brexit, on the grounds that she wouldn’t make a big deal out of it.
And having walked away from their parties, they went to dinner. Where? That would be one of the easiest questions in the pub quiz. The picture they posted of their meal went viral: 11 MPs having a cheeky Nando’s.
It was the Monday after their walkouts, in the evening. They chose that day to make a point. Most of them were former Labour MPs, furious about Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership. They ate at the same time as the Parliamentary Labour Party was holding its weekly meeting, which by this point had become very fractious.
The choice of restaurant was also deliberate. Shuker wanted the group to stand for a new kind of politics. “What better way to embody the cultural difference?” he says. “Instead of turning up to a shouting match at six o’clock, all going to Nando’s. Not Granita, or the Gay Hussar, or The Garrick. Normal people going to a normal place.” A Gang of Slaw, not a Gang of Four.
Nando’s was an unusual place for MPs to go. In more than 20 years reporting and lunching in Westminster, this is the first time I’ve sat in the Victoria branch of the popular chicken chain. People generally prefer to be taken to The Cinnamon Club.
It is some time before I realise that no waiter is going to come and take our order. Shuker sends me to queue at the kitchen instead, where I eventually manage to order a “Ten Wing Roulette” and some sides. “How was that experience?” he asks when I get back to the table. “Try doing it for 11.”
He shows me the order from the night in question. Allen had the wing roulette, where unlabelled chicken pieces have varying degrees of heat. Chris Leslie had the lemon and herb dressing, a hint that he might have been happier going to Granita. Umunna had the Sunset Burger. That gets very messy, Shuker warns me.
Delicious as a meal, a wing roulette is unstable as a political force
The meal was also about maintaining the bond between MPs who, like the wing roulette, came from both left and right, and varied in their level of spiciness. It would not, ultimately, be enough. Delicious as a meal, a wing roulette is unstable as a political force. While some of the Independents, like Shuker, believed there was a problem with the whole way politics was done, for others the main objection to machine politics was that they weren’t in charge of the machine.
The gang might have found a way to make things work had a general election not come along within months.
A final pub quiz question would be how many parties the Change UK MPs were in by that December (five Change UK, five Lib Dems, one independent). Perhaps they just needed more time in the oven.
