Gordon Brown’s speech on Britain’s food storage habits was a strange political moment. Could this be his version of John Major’s Cones Hotline: not a bad idea in itself, but somehow redolent of the man himself. When the Prime Minister becomes a red-faced motorist in a traffic jam it’s demeaning of his office. The Steve Bell image of Major with a cone on his head was almost as iconic as the underpants worn outside his trousers.
Brown is right to talk about not wasting food just as Major was right to be annoyed about roadworks. But the speech just reinforced the nation’s idea of Brown as patronising, interfering and out-of-touch. As the 19th teenage knife-crime victim is named, we don’t want to be told to eat up our greens.
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