Eating lunch with the Lobby in SW1

Why do Westminster hacks like canteen food so much?

Illustration by Clifford Bayly / Bridgeman Images

Were you to examine the cross-section of a political journalist’s brain you would find the precise wording of Section 44 of the Rycroft Review, a phone number for Iain Duncan Smith, three memorised Robert Caro quotes and precisely one joke: “Wow, The Thick of It is like real life!” This is why reading about Westminster can feel like doing your Year 9 geography homework, or surveying a regional bus schedule. Exclusive: Yawn.

And before you start writing that letter, I suggest putting the pen down: I said can – not always. The high-court drama of the Brexit years provided a kind of novelistic insight into the Tory mind, captured, recorded, broadcasted by “the Lobby”. I suspect you could script a play about Peter Mandelson and sell out a full run of the National Theatre (and if not the National, there’s always the Almeida).

But more often than not, the Lobby comes together to answer questions no one has ever asked, like: what happened in session 74, hour three, minute seven of the Public Accounts Committee? And which MP owns the cutest dog? No matter, not everything is interesting all of the time. But this week they will transfer that energy to Liverpool for the Labour Conference – a city that has frankly gone through enough already.

Perfect time, I thought, to inspect the food in parliament – not just the fuel of our journalists, but our lawmakers, their ectomorph staffers, hereditary peers, on-site police, and whoever else makes up the rest of the security passes. I arrive with our red-haired political correspondent – no, the other one. Once through security I am forced to wear a bright orange VISITOR lanyard, or a small alarm that says “Normie Alert!”.

“Don’t forget, you are not one of us,” I feel the self-regarding Palace of Westminster vibrate. OK, whatever. I am here to judge the quality of your lunch, not your levels of open-hearted bonhomie. We head to the “River Restaurant” (no relation to the “Café” a few miles upstream) in the House of Lords. “Restaurant” is a stretch – between these four walls I believe they call that “spin”. This is a fluorescently lit canteen, like one you might have found upstairs at a John Lewis in 1997.

What is it about Britain’s nominal elite and their fondness for school dinners? The long arm of the heat lamp extends beyond Eton and Harrow’s cafeterias, the dining halls of Balliol and Corpus Christi and into the lunch services of the country’s most powerful barristers working in Inner Temple, and our elected lawmakers settling into a roast dinner on a random Wednesday. I glance at a row of vegetables, potatoes, stuffing (think “hockey puck”) and chicken, all kept to temperature under the lamp’s warm, uterine glow.

We eat roast chicken, about the size of an American football, green beans (fine, hard to do badly), broccoli (not great, hard to do well). The server is so friendly I cannot believe he has to spend all week feeding parliamentarians and journalists – a better man than me, no doubt. The menu is not always so parochially English. The best day of the week, as any pass holder will eagerly tell you, is when the “famous” jerk chicken is on. This is supposed to evidence his advanced cosmopolitanism. His insistence on the fact has, unfortunately, the opposite effect.

“There goes Toby Young,” I say, with my mouth full of chicken, to my lunch companion. After the A-list sighting, we walk through the mothballed corridors of the palace, past Strangers’ bar (where staffers and MPs can drink bad Sauvignon Blanc away from peering civilian eyes) and on to the Members’ Terrace. Parliament is grand, comfortable, scruffy, Britain’s political shopfront. And it is also literally sinking into the sludge and mire of the Thames – as metaphors go, a little glib.

But step just metres outside of the estate and you might be in one of the worst parts of London: Parliament Square is a multi-lane roundabout, and Whitehall a pompous dual carriageway pretending to be an avenue. I am surprised anyone who works in such an environment can maintain much enthusiasm for anything. And so, the Lobby’s ability to remain excited about select committees and amendments to the Welsh Devolution Bill might actually be superhuman.

[Further reading: How to eat like a Norman conqueror]