Gawd help us all.....! Anne Treneman, from the Tory conference: "One of the speakers yesterday in Madchester was a teachers’ union leader who decided to change his ways while driving home from a school. He was American and one of those inspirational types that the Tories love so much. He told us that Oprah (no last name necessary) calls these A-ha moments. A-ha, I thought. Well, at least there isn’t a band called Epiphany. I have heard no one saying “A-ha!” at the Tories conference so far, only “Uh-oh.” Nadine Dorries once said that Dave and George were two posh boys who didn’t know the price of milk. After Jeremy Paxman’s interview with Boris (also no surname necessary), Nadine will need to revise that somewhat. “Do you even know the price of a pint of milk?” sneered Jeremy, whose beard continues to perplex. “80p or something like that,” muttered Boris. “No, it’s about 40 something p,” sneered the beard. Boris now, pathetically, tried to pretend he was referring to a larger pint. Jeremy pointed out a pint was a pint. “I don’t know how much a pint of milk costs, so what?” asked Boris, hair gyro-copting. So what? Isn’t this entire conference supposed to be supplying the Tory answer to what Labour is calling the cost-of-living crisis? It is basic journalistic sport that the best way to catch out a Tory is to ask them the price of a kitchen staple. Yesterday, Boris made a speech that told us about how Ed Miliband is trying to go back to the days of Diocletian. So here is a man — or a sheepdog, perhaps — who knows too much about Roman emperors and nothing about a pint of milk. Uh-oh. The day dawned and, as the nation poured their milk (49p) on their cornflakes (£2), the Prime Minister and LBC radio host Nick Ferrari were discussing the cost of living crisis. “What is the cost of a value sliced white bread loaf?” asked Nick. “I don’t buy the value sliced loaf,” said Dave who, of course, could not stop there. “I’ve got a breadmaker at home which I delight in using!” A breadmaker? Uh-oh. That’s like being asked about the price of spaghetti and going on about how you make your own pasta from a special strain of rarefied wheat. Or, when asked about the price of gin, announcing that, actually, you grow your own juniper berries. And it gets better (or worse, depending on if you are a Tory or not). Dave said: “You can buy a loaf in a supermarket for well north of a pound.” Mr Ferrari’s compass said something else: “Or a little bit south. A value loaf is 47p, Prime Minister.” At this point Dave should have said something like: “I must get out more”. Instead, he persisted in telling us more about his secret kitchen life. He explained that, rather than value sliced bread, he was trying to get his children to eat granary. (Does he know that value isn’t a type of flour?) Incredibly, Dave started telling us that in his breadmaker he uses an artisan flour (no doubt achingly expensive) called Cotswold Crunch. “You get some of that, beautifully milled in the Cotswolds, you pop that in your breadmaker. It takes 30 seconds to put the ingredients in there!” he burbled. It was beyond parody. The Tories are not having a cost of living crisis. They are having a cost of knowing nothing one. Uh-oh, indeed."
Posted on: Wed, 02 Oct 2013 07:30:32 +0000
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