Kemi Badenoch may not like immigrants or Doctor Who very much but when she starts taking on sandwiches, that’s when we really have to start speaking up against her.
In an interview with the Spectator, after revealing she’s relishing her position as leader of the opposition – “It’s like a start-up…everyone around me in the leader of the opposition office is there because of me” – she continues, in that strange rebel-CEO-tech-nerd-ego-gone-wild speak that makes LinkedIn such an inspiring spur to suicide ideation, with a dissing of lunch as a concept and sandwiches in particular.
“What’s a lunch break? Lunch is for wimps. I have food brought in and I work and eat at the same time…”
Yeah, if you’re eating at your desk while working, that’s still lunch. You’re hardly raw-dogging it to accentuate your micro-dosing are you? Just because your keyboard is clogged with couscous.
She goes on…
“Sometimes I will eat a steak…I’m not a sandwich person, I don’t think sandwiches are a real food, it’s what you have for breakfast.”
Stop you there, Kemi. Sandwiches are not real food? So much for the Conservative Party respecting Great British History. John Montagu, the 4th Earl of Sandwich and inventor of the thing where you put stuff in between two slices of bread, must be spinning in his well-buttered grave.
Also, sandwiches for breakfast? Who has a tuna and sweetcorn sandwich when they wake up? A breakfast bap doesn’t count, that ain’t a sandwich, more a bread-based medicine for the hungover. Nobody eats sandwiches for breakfast. I’m sorry to get upset, but this feels like Kemi doesn’t know what she’s talking about at all.
What has become of the Conservatives?
And she hasn’t finished…
“I will not touch bread if it’s moist.”
I mean, who asks you to? Are her keen court of helpers, who are only there because of her, feeding her like they would feed ducks? Chucking in scraps of bread out of fear that it could be misinterpreted as lunch?
Bread shouldn’t be soggy of course. But, the suggestion is that sandwiches are somehow inherently moist of bread, when in fact if you’re doing a sandwich correctly, the bread will not be moist at all.
Sure, the filling will have a moistness, if say you’re havinga lovely creamy egg mayonnaise sandwich, or even adding coleslaw to bring some spark to your ham and cheese, but the genius of the sandwich is that the bread itself should stay relatively dry. The butter, or margarine if you’re in Reform UK, acts as a kind of damp proofing against such risks.
Plus, come on, if it does get a bit moist, like you spill a bit of Ribena on it, then you still get it down you. This is schoolchildren stuff. As with everything to do with sandwiches, the learning has been passed down to us from generation to generation. As a child, my father took me on a coach down to London to see a rugby league final and somewhere around Doncaster I puked into the plastic bag containing our sandwiches. A few hours later, and growing peckish, my dad decided to press on and eat the sandwiches.
Now that is the kind of thing that fills me with Great British pride.
It’s the kind of thing that won us every war in history, that helped our Empire become the most unquestionably glorious one that ever existed, and what should be driving us cheering into the future, butter knives aloft.
What has become of the Conservatives? After their humiliation after the last election, this is now their stance for winning back hearts and minds? A “rallying” call of “We Hate Sandwiches”.
Well, Kemi is in for a shock. It is truly a long way back for her Party now…
Martin Robinson is a London Standard writer
