Popular Conservatism, the free market organisation launched by Liz Truss and friends in February, is trying to live up to the “popular” bit of its name by jumping on the bandwagon of comedian Ed Gamble. He had his tour posters pulled from the Tube last week because they featured him eating a hot dog, in breach of TfL’s junk food advertising policy. The comedian, who co-hosts the Off Menu podcast, replaced the hot dog with a cucumber.
This has enraged PopCon director Mark Littlewood. “I use public transport a lot in London but I have yet to meet a single passenger who is praising our overlords for helping them lose weight,” he wrote in the organisation’s newsletter. “We have allowed an interfering state apparatus to emerge that has far too much unchecked power,” he went on. It seems the Trussites have taken the issue to heart more than Gamble himself, who said: “I don’t have a problem with the TfL regulations; they make sense to me. But the new posters promote something way more harmful: the idea that cucumbers pair well with ketchup and mustard.”
Wokery scone too far
Hot on the heels of woke flag gate comes a new Great British scandal: The National Trust have made their scones vegan. In an “exclusive” article, the Daily Mail froths with rage over the charity’s “‘woke’ use of vegetable-based spread” for the scones served in their tearooms, branding it a “virtue-signalling betrayal” of the British staple’s buttery heritage. But Celia Richardson, who is director of communications at the National Trust, has spotted a flaw in the Mail’s confected rage. She points out that in 2018, “the very same Daily Mail” published the National Trust’s scone recipe, which it described as “truly scrumptious” and a “national pleasure” at the time. The woke butter alternative that they didn’t seem to mind back then? Margarine, which, incidentally, the National Trust have been making their scones with for years.
