Theresa May's mouldy jam eating anecdote is the perfect metaphor for what she's doing to the country

The PM's approach to Brexit has been to ignore the obviously poisonous fungus in pursuit of the fictional, untarnished preserve below

There was a time when I thought that no politician would have to try harder to seem normal than Ed Miliband. But from the moment Theresa May took her first steps into Downing Street, it was clear she was in a different league.

May (or “Robo-May as she is known) has made many attempts to break her cyborg-like demeanour, but it’s fair to say that media isn’t her strong point. During her disastrous election campaign, she infamously said the “naughtiest” thing she’d ever done was running through wheat fields as a child.

The same year, Vogue struggled to create a thrilling profile on May when the juiciest piece of info was that her husband Philip makes a “very good mushroom risotto”. In 2018, she revealed Phil has added beans on toast to his repertoire – and thank goodness for that. Then there was her completely bizarre curtsying in front of the royal family. And the dancing. So. Much. Dancing.

Though when May convened her squadron of backstabbers and frontstabbers at cabinet this week, we were treated to another thrilling glimpse into her inner psyche. When discussing food waste, May told cabinet ministers that she often scrapes the mould off the top of jam to eat the “good” preserve underneath.

This has caused the rights and wrongs of jam consumption to be hotly debated online. One thing that’s not up for discussion, though, is the fact that May’s premiership is often foreshadowed by calamitous and eerily fitting metaphors. In 2017, the letters of “BUILDING A COUNTRY THAT WORKS FOR EVERYONE” slowly fell off as she spluttered through her “make or break” conference speech. The next year, in September, a late night Brexit statement from Downing Street was delayed due to a “lack of power” – the jokes really do write themselves.

Yet the revelation that May keeps and eats potentially rotten jam to reduce waste is the best metaphor for her premiership yet. In fact, scrapping the mould off is what May has done her entire career and, by extension, what she has been doing to Britain since she took over as PM.

Scraping off the mould is what the conservatives have done well over the last decade. They’ve casually scraped off troubling news of staggeringly high levels of homelessness, or cash-starved public services and 120,000 austerity-related deaths in pursuit of a sweet, gooey and economically balanced preserve that still doesn’t exist.

May’s entire approach to Brexit has been to ignore the obviously poisonous mould in pursuit of the fictional, untarnished jam below. She has discarded warnings from the NHS and education leaders, from the car industry and supermarket bosses and is even now thought to be considering a no-deal Brexit based on private polling and focus groups.

The prime minister applies the same rationale to her MPs and cabinet ministers. Last year she “scraped the mould” off Amber Rudd, inviting the former Home Secretary back into government after she had resigned for misleading parliament over the Windrush Scandal. She then restored the party whip to two Tory MPs who were suspended over serious sexual misconduct allegations so they could take part in a confidence vote. Former foreign secretary Boris Johnson was a particularly poisonous mould, but May still let him leave his post on his own terms, scraping his sins off her government’s preserve on a practically daily basis.

For May, jam is clearly symbolic. After all, she gifted president Donald Trump with jam and marmalade when she first visited him in Washington in January 2017. Though given his notoriously germ-phobic ways, he’ll probably steer clear after May’s revelation. International Trade Secretary Liam Fox – himself forgiven for the tarnish of a 2011 scandal while defence secretary – has his own disconcerting opinions on jam, of course. In 2016 he reassured people that Brexit would not be a disaster because he had a plan to sell “innovative British jams and marmalade” to the world.

May probably wants her approach to jam to be seen as a comforting ethos: a “make do and mend” or “waste not, want not” attitude. But in truth, the prime minister and the nostalgic fantasists in her government, resemble only the mould, not the jam. Theirs is the fungus that must be scraped off if we are to address the issues of inequality, injustice and resentment. May can try to avoid it all she likes, but her batch of jam, boiled from rotten fruits, is well past its use-by date.