It’s strange to think of politicians eating at all, since in all their public environments – the House of Commons, on the telly – they’re not allowed even to chew gum. Yet we know they do eat, and furthermore, that’s where all the best stuff happens. The latest Conservative wheeze is to use the breaking of bread to assure people that they are normal: that may be why the anti-May Brexit plotters have failed, so far, to come up with any plausible plan to stop her, because it took them so long to figure out what normal people might eat. They finally alighted on Pizza Club – Michael Gove, Penny Mordaunt, Chris Grayling, Liam Fox and Andrea Leadsom – and, hats off, really, guys, because I for one am now persuaded that you are decent, regular folk who would never do anything to make the country permanently poorer.
For a long time Labour had the opposite problem. Granita, famously, was where Tony Blair and Gordon Brown sealed their gentlemen’s agreement, in which one would stand aside for the other in that niggly matter of the Labour leadership, and in return, the victor would hand over to the first – but only after he’d profoundly alienated all believers and the world was about to catch fire. It was not a good deal, as you’d expect from a restaurant named after a pudding that is not a real pudding. It stuck in the psyche, not because it was plain from the outset how bad the deal would turn out to be, but because it seemed to signify something important about New Labour: proper Labour would have done their talking over pork scratchings, scampi-flavoured fries, tops. An Islington venue, a fancy menu, and – I have no doubt – a price list faithfully reported by the Daily Mail, these were all signs of the age, where Peter Mandelson thought mushy peas were guacamole and all were welcome on the left, even the rich.
The great leftie haunt, of course, was the Gay Hussar in Soho, but its distinction was not about price, it was about that tang of iron curtain, the ironic dance, “ha, call us communists, would you? Just because we believe in trades unions and people not starving? But we do like borscht … so” (villainous eyebrows) “Who’s to say who’s really telling the truth?” Even by the time I was politically cognisant, which is now a billion and a half years, the Gay Hussar no longer meant all of that, it was somewhere between a shibboleth (“are you knowledgable enough to know what it’s supposed to mean?”) and a theme park.
Cross-party plots can happen in top-end restaurants since the diners don’t have to conform to what “their sort” ought to eat. They can always blame their opposite numbers. So when a certain Labour peer whom I couldn’t support more in other disputes (OK, it’s Shami Chakrabarti) was plotting with David Davis over civil liberties in the Labour years, they always met in the Cinnamon Club, where you can casually drop £28 for a korma, and if you have a regular curry joint, it is basically impossible to go in there, for all that it’s delicious, without spending the whole night going, “but … but I had another one that was almost as good for EIGHT OF YOUR BRITISH POUNDS.” Sometimes, only cheap will do: when Alistair Darling had his famous “balti bailout”, in which he averted banking disaster by buying everything rotten and letting them keep everything good, it had to be a takeaway. If they’d even gone to Kennington Tandoori, that would have been a receipt too far for the baying British public. The meeting, incidentally, ended at 1.30am, and they reconvened at 5am to sign it off. It is horrible to imagine their digestion.
A completely irrelevant coda: years ago, I saw Ken Clarke in a curry house, by himself, and I tried to persuade him to join me and my sister and some other low lifes and he politely declined, and I’d had four pints and just wouldn’t give over, and a lesser politician, anybody else in his godforsaken party, in fact, would have called the police, but he somehow managed to distract me and I went away. The last honest man on the right eats alone.