'Kitchengate'
Marina Hyde writing in The Guardian takes aim at politicians including Ed Miliband who are desperate for the kind of toe curling photo-shoot which led to the Labour leader being pictured having a nice cup of tea in the second kitchen of his London home.
The only saving grace is that Ed didn't make as big a fool of himself as Yanis Varoufakis, the Greek finance minister, whose country may going to the dogs but he at least has time to pose for some delightful shots 'at home' in Athens although his city centre pad (with the Parthenon in the background) looks pretty swish to me and not in the least austere.
Out with policies, in with pedal bins: kitchenology will decide the election
By Marina Hyde - The Guardian
This focus on the politics of lifestyle is absurd. By playing along Miliband has only himself to blame
Sofa politics: Michelle Obama and Samantha Cameron enjoying all the comforts that British taxpayers can buy, in the prime minister's Downing Street residence. Photograph: Rex Features
Politicians: if you can’t stand talking about the kitchen, maybe get out of the kitchen? We’ll never know the precise chain of events that led to Ed Miliband and his wife being pictured in the second kitchen of their north London house as opposed to the first – but frankly, who needs to? They agreed to be pictured in the kitchen. The rest is just geography.
When the Sacred Texts of the Spin Doctors are discovered on some olde memorie sticke in 2815, there will be a whole chapter on politicians’ kitchens. It will detail how a population narcotised by almost two decades of property makeover shows was judged emotionally reachable only via pictures of mixer taps and stainless steel range cookers. This was ruled to be simply the only language they understood. They were way more at home being shown a pedal bin than they were a policy.
Make no mistake: politicians really want us to talk about their kitchens, otherwise they wouldn’t be pictured in them with such bizarre frequency. None of them are immune from it, including cod outsider Nigel Farage – only the other Sunday a Ukip press officer posted a picture of the party leader in his kitchen, preparing for an appearance on one or another of the political telly shows.
Even the leather-jacketed Greek finance minister, Yanis Varoufakis, has just put half his credibility down the waste disposal, with an excruciating “at home” in the magazine Paris Match. I know Yanis doesn’t have a whole lot on at the moment, but you sense that even if he did, it would be important to find the time to serve his wife a green salad for the benefit of some photographers.
Much about the coming general election is uncertain, but we know one thing for sure. There will be more kitchens. Consider this encouraging fact: before the 2010 election we literally saw more of David Cameron’s north Kensington kitchen than we did of his policy to entirely reorganise the NHS. The latter was never even mentioned in the Tory manifesto; yet so many “WebCameron” episodes were set in the former, I could probably tell you where he kept the tinfoil.
It’s politics as lifestyle catalogue – and which of us, when we hear some expense-chiselling Tory MP honking that “Clearly there’s no cost of living crisis for Two Kitchens Miliband”, doesn’t want to smash our own head in with a Carrara marble pestle? Ideally, in five years’ time, voters will simply be able to walk through an Ikea-store-style series of kitchen tableaux and decide the future of the health service on the basis of which leader has made the more acceptable hob choice.
The implication of all this is increasingly clear: namely, that one of the most important decisions any aspiring politician can make is what kitchen to get. We’ve basically ceded control of this country’s political destiny to a Magnet salesman. Maybe kitchen retailers could institute a special bonus category for sales targets: a small percentage if you get them to upgrade to the granite surface. A larger one if you sell 10 kitchens in a week. And a pension windfall if your breakfast nook scheme effectively ringfences defence spending until 2020.
It’s kitchen cabinet, if not as we know it. Yet for the politicians caught up in these reality-effect stagings, one’s tears struggle to liquefy. The Milibands are the architects of their own misfortunes (if not their own kitchenette). There is precisely no requirement to invite the cameras into your own home, and if you dance with the devil in this way, the form book suggests you will get pricked by his horns. Or at the very least, by his superior toasting fork.
Michael Gove’s wife Sarah Vine apparently deems the public too stupid to remember that it coughed up for half of decor
Still, I think we can live without taking some of the derision levelled at the Labour leader this week too seriously. Hats off to Michael Gove’s wife Sarah Vine, who devoted a page of the Daily Mail to casting aspersions on the Milibands’ decor, apparently deeming the public too stupid to remember that it coughed up for half of hers. Or at least, it did until the Telegraph exposé of MPs’ expenses forced Mr Gove to repay £7,000 of it, which had been spent on essentials such as “a birch Camargue chair” and “a birdcage coffee table”. My best bit was the part where Vine explained that her tedious Hovis advert of a family kitchen was 10 years old and rickety. Talk to the Commons authorities, madam – failing that, see if Dacre will let you stick one through on exes.
Obviously, the Daily Mail thinkpiece that I really want to see is a double-page special headlined “The Deluded Domestic Grandeur of the ‘Prime Minister in Waiting’” – which states that in having two kitchens, Ed Miliband is clearly trying to simulate Downing Street in his own home. The most notable other house with two kitchens, you see, is the prime minister’s official residence, where Samantha Cameron’s distaste for what she found upon moving in saw the couple spend £30,000 of public money installing something more “them”, in which they have been frequently photographed.
So yes, if it isn’t already in hand, one of the Mail’s big hitters should be deployed to churn out 2,000 words explaining how it was one thing having a father who hated Britain so much that he fought for the country in the second world war and then emigrated here, but it is a matter of an even more grave order that the Labour leader should be emulating the two kitchens of Downing Street in this horrifyingly presumptuous way. “There are several cases of prime ministers acting as though they were in No 10 after they had left office,” this opus would intone. “But only Ed Miliband has had the hubris to do it before.” He’s probably got a rose garden out the back, and a mini cabinet room in the basement.
There was once a political world where kitchenology played no part. In fact, if you ever see a historical photo of Winston Churchill or Margaret Thatcher (or indeed any PM pre-Blair) in a kitchen, it seems a curiosity – a glimpse of some fleeting moment when they weren’t doing something substantial or epoch-defining. I do hope that we’re moving towards an early 21st century reversal of the situation, in which rare pictures of David Cameron caught off-guard being prime minister are an intriguing oddity, and make you wonder reflexively why he isn’t sluicing down his worktop with one of those twattish chrome sprayer taps.
Politicians: if you can’t stand talking about the kitchen, maybe get out of the kitchen? We’ll never know the precise chain of events that led to Ed Miliband and his wife being pictured in the second kitchen of their north London house as opposed to the first – but frankly, who needs to? They agreed to be pictured in the kitchen. The rest is just geography.
When the Sacred Texts of the Spin Doctors are discovered on some olde memorie sticke in 2815, there will be a whole chapter on politicians’ kitchens. It will detail how a population narcotised by almost two decades of property makeover shows was judged emotionally reachable only via pictures of mixer taps and stainless steel range cookers. This was ruled to be simply the only language they understood. They were way more at home being shown a pedal bin than they were a policy.
Make no mistake: politicians really want us to talk about their kitchens, otherwise they wouldn’t be pictured in them with such bizarre frequency. None of them are immune from it, including cod outsider Nigel Farage – only the other Sunday a Ukip press officer posted a picture of the party leader in his kitchen, preparing for an appearance on one or another of the political telly shows.
Even the leather-jacketed Greek finance minister, Yanis Varoufakis, has just put half his credibility down the waste disposal, with an excruciating “at home” in the magazine Paris Match. I know Yanis doesn’t have a whole lot on at the moment, but you sense that even if he did, it would be important to find the time to serve his wife a green salad for the benefit of some photographers.
Much about the coming general election is uncertain, but we know one thing for sure. There will be more kitchens. Consider this encouraging fact: before the 2010 election we literally saw more of David Cameron’s north Kensington kitchen than we did of his policy to entirely reorganise the NHS. The latter was never even mentioned in the Tory manifesto; yet so many “WebCameron” episodes were set in the former, I could probably tell you where he kept the tinfoil.
It’s politics as lifestyle catalogue – and which of us, when we hear some expense-chiselling Tory MP honking that “Clearly there’s no cost of living crisis for Two Kitchens Miliband”, doesn’t want to smash our own head in with a Carrara marble pestle? Ideally, in five years’ time, voters will simply be able to walk through an Ikea-store-style series of kitchen tableaux and decide the future of the health service on the basis of which leader has made the more acceptable hob choice.
The implication of all this is increasingly clear: namely, that one of the most important decisions any aspiring politician can make is what kitchen to get. We’ve basically ceded control of this country’s political destiny to a Magnet salesman. Maybe kitchen retailers could institute a special bonus category for sales targets: a small percentage if you get them to upgrade to the granite surface. A larger one if you sell 10 kitchens in a week. And a pension windfall if your breakfast nook scheme effectively ringfences defence spending until 2020.
It’s kitchen cabinet, if not as we know it. Yet for the politicians caught up in these reality-effect stagings, one’s tears struggle to liquefy. The Milibands are the architects of their own misfortunes (if not their own kitchenette). There is precisely no requirement to invite the cameras into your own home, and if you dance with the devil in this way, the form book suggests you will get pricked by his horns. Or at the very least, by his superior toasting fork.
Michael Gove’s wife Sarah Vine apparently deems the public too stupid to remember that it coughed up for half of decor
Still, I think we can live without taking some of the derision levelled at the Labour leader this week too seriously. Hats off to Michael Gove’s wife Sarah Vine, who devoted a page of the Daily Mail to casting aspersions on the Milibands’ decor, apparently deeming the public too stupid to remember that it coughed up for half of hers. Or at least, it did until the Telegraph exposé of MPs’ expenses forced Mr Gove to repay £7,000 of it, which had been spent on essentials such as “a birch Camargue chair” and “a birdcage coffee table”. My best bit was the part where Vine explained that her tedious Hovis advert of a family kitchen was 10 years old and rickety. Talk to the Commons authorities, madam – failing that, see if Dacre will let you stick one through on exes.
Obviously, the Daily Mail thinkpiece that I really want to see is a double-page special headlined “The Deluded Domestic Grandeur of the ‘Prime Minister in Waiting’” – which states that in having two kitchens, Ed Miliband is clearly trying to simulate Downing Street in his own home. The most notable other house with two kitchens, you see, is the prime minister’s official residence, where Samantha Cameron’s distaste for what she found upon moving in saw the couple spend £30,000 of public money installing something more “them”, in which they have been frequently photographed.
So yes, if it isn’t already in hand, one of the Mail’s big hitters should be deployed to churn out 2,000 words explaining how it was one thing having a father who hated Britain so much that he fought for the country in the second world war and then emigrated here, but it is a matter of an even more grave order that the Labour leader should be emulating the two kitchens of Downing Street in this horrifyingly presumptuous way. “There are several cases of prime ministers acting as though they were in No 10 after they had left office,” this opus would intone. “But only Ed Miliband has had the hubris to do it before.” He’s probably got a rose garden out the back, and a mini cabinet room in the basement.
There was once a political world where kitchenology played no part. In fact, if you ever see a historical photo of Winston Churchill or Margaret Thatcher (or indeed any PM pre-Blair) in a kitchen, it seems a curiosity – a glimpse of some fleeting moment when they weren’t doing something substantial or epoch-defining. I do hope that we’re moving towards an early 21st century reversal of the situation, in which rare pictures of David Cameron caught off-guard being prime minister are an intriguing oddity, and make you wonder reflexively why he isn’t sluicing down his worktop with one of those twattish chrome sprayer taps.
