Kemi Badenoch’s war on sandwiches makes her look even more out of touch

As the Tory leader reveals her aversion to the classic British lunch staple, and how she can’t abide ‘moist’ bread, Sean O’Grady says such gluten intolerance surely means she’s toast at the next election

Does she only eat stale bread – and raw meat? Kemi Badenoch’s bizarre contribution to The Spectator suggests that she has some very odd personal ways, exceeding perhaps anything we’ve ever known in the political sphere.

“I will not touch bread if it’s moist,” she proudly declares, as if this was some indication of her innate moral fibre.

Bread is a very personal thing, obviously, and knowing the price of a loaf is also an essential piece of political knowledge. We all have our preferences, from a classic soft white cob, to no-no nonsense pitta, to the unyielding clagginess of a continental rye loaf. But an antipathy to bread that’s moist suggests a kind of misplaced moral absolutism of frankly Puritan proportions. We’ve heard of gluten intolerant, Kemi, but this is ridiculous.

Hardly less disturbing, not to say puzzling, is her open contempt for the sandwich, surely the greatest (or only) British culinary gift to the world: “I’m not a sandwich person, I don’t think sandwiches are a real food – it’s what you have for breakfast.”

Is this what she and the Tories have in mind for us in their sinister Project 2030? A land without sarnies, the soft, liberal texture of the tuna mayo or the insipid mildness of the classic coronation chicken filling being repugnant to her, and thus – we may fear – banned; victims of the Conservative cultural warrior’s insatiable hunger for new victims?

To be fair to Badenoch – a gesture I appreciate would never be reciprocated by her – she is right in the sense that the BLT is the staple breakfast of any Briton on the move of a morning; but she does seem to have this thing about sandwiches being a signal of moral turpitude, which is, well, a bit odd.

She seeks to impress with her work ethic, cringingly invoking that cliche “lunch is for wimps”, a terribly self-conscious, gauche way that seems entirely typical of the leader of the opposition – a 17-year old brat trapped in a 44-year old MP’s body.

Apparently, she doesn’t believe in “decompression”, which figures. But she rather spoils the Gordon Gekko vibe by dropping the line that: “I have food brought in, and I work and eat at the same time. There’s no time. Sometimes, I will get a steak…” Now, raw, rare or medium, it is not possible, even for Badenoch, to eat a steak single-handed and work at the same time. And that sort of problem is, in fact, precisely why the Earl of Sandwich invented the two-bits-of-bread-with-something – famously so he could play cards without interruption. So there, Kemi.

None of this eccentricity will necessarily prevent Badenoch from being Britain’s next prime minister. In so many ways, Badenoch resembles Margaret Thatcher in the Iron Lady’s time as leader of the opposition, and that includes a certain quality of being an ingenue.

I can recall the time, soon after Thatcher’s election as leader of the Conservatives in 1975, when Mrs Thatcher invited a newspaper into her home. Like Badenoch, the country wanted to know more about this new prospective leader. It was a time of high inflation, and Mrs T proudly showed the interviewer her larder, stacked high with tins of food, purchased in an attempt to beat rising prices.

A wealthy woman herself, she commended the habit of buying in bulk to the nation, and was cordially ridiculed for her trouble. She was even nicknamed, very briefly, “Squirrel”, for her food hoarding habits. The difference with Badenoch is that at least what Thatcher was doing was rational and, indeed, many did follow her example, whereas none of us, in a hurry or not, can get someone to bring us steak – and the whiff of entitlement does cling to Badenoch, by all accounts.

Thatcher also liked scrambled eggs on toast for lunch – her way of “decompressing” – and, even when she was prime minister, she insisted on making her husband Denis his supper. She may have got by on four hours’ sleep a night, and was an obvious workaholic who disliked holidays. But you may be sure that, somewhere in her busy life, Mrs Thatcher would make use of a sandwich, perhaps even one made by herself, with moist bread.