Earlier this month, Rishi Sunak went to the economically depressed, wealthy second-home owners’ paradise of Cornwall, which is now £230m down as the Conservative government’s promises to replace funding lost from the EU because of Brexit remain predictably unmet. Take back control! Enjoy your fish!! What did the EU ever do for us? The Eden Project. The Hall for Cornwall. The South West Coast Path. Newlyn fish market. Penzance’s Jubilee Pool. The Camborne to Pool link road. Superfast broadband. The Penzance heliport. Oh.
While in Cornwall, Sunak went for a photo op at a dentist that, it transpired, wasn’t accepting new adult NHS patients, a real problem for the Cornish populace, who having gnashed their teeth down to the gums in a nonspecific fury with the EU, now have no teeth left to gnash at the London newspaper columnists buying up their family cottages for half-term holidays twice a year with insolent middle-class teenage sons who steal locals’ lobsters out of pots in the harbour and eat them round campfires on the beach while smoking weed and having sex with their friends’ sisters.
Then, as the sweet scent of deregulation wafted through a country now liberated from Brussels’ ability to punish polluters, Sunak deftly avoided the stench of the sewage-lapped beaches of Wastewater Sands, Stinkin Bay, Mawgan Filth, Filth, Faecal North, Faecal South, Craptock, Trevaunfilth Cove, Pisstreath, Gwithian Turdans, Godrevy Turdans, Perranuthpoo, Porthoushit, Colstridia Haven, Pentestank, Readecoli Cove, East Poo, Millenpiss, Shaton, Downsmelly, Portwinkle, Kingshatton and Porthkidney Discharge.
Instead, Sunak went to the Philps pasty shop in Hayle, where he rat-nibbled a Cornish pasty in such an obtuse way to suggest that every other meal the prime minister had eaten up until that point in his life had been cut up into tiny pieces with a silver cake fork and fed to him by Jacob Rees-Mogg’s nanny on loan, parcelling it into his stupid lying face while pinching his nose and praising him. “Who’s a clever boy? Who’s going to be prime minister? Rishi is.”
A clearly confused Sunak held the unfamiliar pasty at both ends and munched a big half-moon-shaped bite into the middle of it, like Scooby-Doo attacking an especially large cartoon sandwich. Had Sunak continued in this fashion, he would have been left holding a pasty end in each hand while making a confused face, as if baffled by the disappearance of the main body of the pasty proper.
Sunak’s pasty technique inspired local debate. Was Sunak in fact eating the pasty in the authentic way a 19th-century Cornish tin miner with dirty fingers would, as opposed to the modern way, crust first, like a Greggs steak bake shielded in a paper bag? Or should Sunak have probed the pasty in the way that DH Lawrence, who sought sanctuary in Zennor during the first world war, would have done, namely in the “Greek” fashion, till suddenly, in the spasm of coition, tupping like a jerking leap, and oh!
Was it possible that Sunak’s policy wonks had advised him to eat the pasty in the Scooby-tinner style to court the support of Cornish traditionalists, even more alienated now that the Brexit they voted for had left them even more ruined? All that was certain is that the pasty shop Sunak visited received such a massive backlash that within hours it had thoroughly cleansed its social media feeds of any mention of Sunak’s visit, in a process now known as pasty-washing.
When will politicians learn to avoid food? It normally works out about as well as when they encounter actual members of the public. Gordon Brown’s 2010 campaign suffered when he was famously caught on a still-live microphone describing his confrontation with a Rochdale Labour voter Gillian Duffy thus: “That was a disaster – they should never have put me with that woman. Whose idea was that? Ridiculous… she was just a bigoted woman.” Luckily, Sunak’s aides swiftly stepped in to suppress a rogue recording of his own post-Pastygate tantrum: “That was a disaster – they should never have put me with that pasty. Whose idea was that? Ridiculous. It was too big for my face.”
But the papers soon had their fun and just days later even I, a massive fan of pasties, who also hates Tories, can barely remember the chance meeting at a pasty shop of Sunak and a pasty. But to this day we all remember the alfresco dining disaster of Ed Miliband, the butterfly broken on a bacon sandwich.
On 21 May 2014, the Labour leader was photographed, a thorough 13 times by the Evening Standard’s Jeremy Selwyn, eating a bacon sandwich in an ungainly fashion in a cafe in London’s New Covent Garden market, which he visited on the campaign trail. The newspaper, which by that time was mainly owned by the future Tory prime minister Boris Johnson’s friends the former KGB spy Alexander Lebedev and his son, the future Lord of Siberia Baron Evgeny Lebedev, then ran a sequence of Eadweard Muybridge-style photos showing Miliband’s face, caught between mouthfuls, looking as ridiculous as possible. Rightwing media ran with it. A year later, David Cameron’s campaign released a picture of him eating a hotdog with a knife and fork. Although he looked hopelessly posh, he at least wasn’t making a funny face.
Within days, the Conservative pre-campaign media machine had moved on, leaving Cornwall to its sewage and its suddenly unsubsidised unviability, Philps’s pasty business fighting to recover its reputation. In Plymouth, the Right Honourable Johnny Mercer MP “took the PM for a quick jog around a blustery City, and showed him the names of some of my mates on the Commando memorial we built to them. Rishi Sunak is resilient, tough, determined, like we were back in the day. Tough times make tough folks.”
Stewart Lee’s Basic Lee is on tour in February at Scunthorpe Baths Hall (22), Coventry Belgrade theatre (24-25) and Wycombe Swan (26); it continues in March at Northampton Royal & Derngate (1) and Theatre Royal Plymouth (3)
