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It's Politics ... But Not as We Know It

Elliott and Thompson Limited

The price of bread

Politics is serious. The way it is practised, and certainly the way it is presented by the majority of current politicians, is deadly serious. It's no laughing matter. But here's a funny story that sums up a lot about modern politics.

It was autumn 2013 and Boris Johnson, Mayor of London, had just appeared on Newsnight with Jeremy Paxman. This was at the height of party conference season, so all the guests wanted to talk about were nitty-gritty issues such as foreign policy, immigration, unemployment and God knows what else.

And this is a regular trick up journalists' sleeves – they also did it to George Bush Sr in the US presidential election – Paxman asked Boris Johnson the price of a pint of milk. Boris clearly doesn't buy his own milk because he fumbled it! He guessed 'about 80p or something like that', then tried to pretend he was talking about 'er, er, one of those biggish ones' when Paxman told him it was around 40p for a pint. Boris even tried to turn the tables, but Paxman was having none of it: 'I'm not standing for election, you are.'

So I had David Cameron on the show the following day and at the end I said something along the lines of, 'I have time for just one final question – the mayor was asked by Jeremy Paxman yesterday what a pint of milk costs,' and as I heard him chuckle down the line I said, 'I wouldn't do anything as low as that. Instead, Prime Minister, what's the cost of a value sliced white bread loaf at Tesco or Sainsbury's this morning? You'd know the price of that, wouldn't you, Prime Minister?'

Cameron said something like, 'Well, it's gonna cost you, er, well north of a pound, I mean, er, I actually don't buy the value sliced loaf, um, um, I've got a breadmaker at home which I delight in using and it turns out in all sorts of different ways but ...'

After I told him the cost was 47p, he said something like: 'Look, I'm trying to get my children to eat er, er, the sort of granary – and they take it actually, they like my home-made bread.' Then, 'A little plug for the flour made in my constituency – Cotswold Crunch – you get some of that, beautifully milled in the Cotswolds, you pop that in your breadmaker.'

And as he said this, I was thinking, 'Oh no, the Daily Mirror, they'll be googling "Cotswold Crunch" right now,' and, of course, they did and found out that it's handmade and it costs a whopping £30.20 for a 16kg sack.

He then went and asked if he could recommend a breadmaker to me.

And I said, 'Well actually, Prime Minister, I've tried them and the trouble with these breadmakers is that they take so long, they take about three hours ...'

And he said, 'I'd recommend the Panasonic. There you are, that's another shameless plug. Very easy – even Nick Ferrari could work a Panasonic breadmaker.'

And I thought, 'God, the Mirror ...'

Of course, they did google the Panasonic breadmaker – £139. Twice the weekly Job-seeker's Allowance! Totally out of touch.

There was loads of coverage the next day: 'The mayor doesn't know the price of a pint of milk!'; 'The PM doesn't know the price of a loaf!'

About a week later, I was at the Daily Mirror Pride of Britain awards and I saw the prime minister, so I proffered my hand and said, 'I'm terribly sorry, Prime Minister, about bread-gate the other day. Honestly, I had no idea ...' He laughed and said, 'Oh, don't worry!' Then he reached down and picked up my bread roll, giving it a squeeze and joking, 'Can I just say, I don't think you got the texture of this one particularly right. You left the bread machine on too long, didn't you, Nick?' What he didn't realise was, it was Diane Abbott's bread roll – she was sitting next to me for dinner. To this day, Diane doesn't have a clue why the prime minister handled her bread roll!

Boris Johnson came in a couple of weeks after that and the issue was still bouncing around, it really was the gift that kept on giving. He sat down, and I could see that he was clutching a briefing piece of paper in his podgy paws and that it had nothing to do with Tube fares or the fight against crime, or his favourite topic of cyclists and cycle lanes – it listed the price of all sorts of items from baked beans to a pint.

We were live and I said, 'So, Boris, what are you going to do about the Hammersmith flyover? Shafting people in London, the state of the traffic jams and everyone with a job to get to ...'

And he was waiting for me to say, 'Never mind that, I want you to tell me the price of a tin of Heinz Baked Beans!'

He waited so long that eventually he broke and said something like, 'Aren't you going to ask me the price of everyday groceries today?' Poor Boris, poised with his answers to crucial questions of the day like ... how much is a tin of beans?

I said, 'No, I am not going to ask you that, but tell me, Mayor ... do you happen to know the price of Fortnum & Mason champagne?' And, of course, he got it to within 50p!

Despite the silly outcome, this story makes a really important point. It's not about trying to catch politicians out for the sake of it. If they don't know the price of the basic foodstuffs that most people are surviving on, how can they claim to be our representatives?

It's crucial to be in touch, to live in the real world – whether you're a millionaire from the Bullingdon Club or you've worked your way up from the shop floor via the trade unions. Or even, as so many are these days, if you're coming straight into politics from the nursery via a degree in PPE (Philosophy, Politics and Economics, for the rest of us) at a proto-Westminster Oxbridge college with a name that you have to be born into landed gentry to know how to pronounce.

The majority in this country are working people living in the real world with all its demands, stretching their limited resources to get by the best they can, people who commute to their job every day, pay their bills and raise their families: they just don't recognise themselves, or their hopes and dreams, in our political leaders.

If you talk to people of my parents' generation – both of them actually served in the war; they were products of the 1920s – there was a real belief back then that politicians could make a difference. But now, people have very little faith in politicians: there is a worryingly low turnout at elections, and politicians just don't live like us any more. A lot of people participated in the Scottish referendum, which just goes to show that the electorate can be engaged when people really do care about the result. There will be a big fallout from the referendum result, and that needs to be addressed by our Westminster politicians – and they had better get it right.

Simply put, we need representatives who engage with us. The best way to make a connection with the electorate is to talk to us on our own terms. If you walk into a pub tonight and you find a group of our politicians sitting there, which one would you actually want to have a drink with, if they promised not to put it on expenses?

Could you bear to have a drink with Tony Blair? I very much doubt it.

Would you have a drink with Alex Salmond? Possibly, depending on your political views. Similarly, you might happily have a drink with Nigel Farage, who famously said 'every pub is a parliament'.

Would you enjoy a drink with Boris Johnson? I think so. Boris would just be a laugh. He's not going to use the opportunity to convince you about some political initiative; he would talk about something funny, he'd be normal.

Whenever Tony Blair tried to engage with people, it was pretty ugly. The distance between him and the public was huge – the distance between Boris, or Alex, and the public is about five inches.

I recall one time when Tony Blair was campaigning on the road and he bumped into a lady called Sharron Storer outside a hospital in Birmingham. Her partner had been admitted as a lymphatic cancer patient, and he'd had to be transferred to A&E because there were no beds in the bone-marrow transplant unit. This man, who was already extremely ill, was put at great risk of infection.

Ms Storer asked Mr Blair, 'What are you going to do? ... He suffered terribly. Would you like to tell me how you are going to provide these people with better facilities? ... All you do is walk around and make yourself known but you don't do anything to help anybody.' She said, 'All he kept saying was, "They're going to do better, they are trying." But he has been trying for years, in my opinion, and they still haven't got it right.'

Tony Blair was trying to shift the responsibility onto hospital staff rather than admit that the health-care system was failing because of his policies. As the then Conservative Party Chairman Michael Ancram said at the time, 'This afternoon in Birmingham, four years of Labour spin were crushed by four minutes of reality.'

Our leaders need to understand that there are no shortcuts to building a relationship with the electorate. We will not be fobbed off with toothy smiles and empty promises. Only when they really understand the pressures of real life outside Westminster, will they be able to grasp the issues that matter to us and respond by pushing those concerns to the top of the political agenda.

The political disconnect

Politicians cannot hope to bridge the gap between their ideas and our world if they have never held a proper job outside the political arena. It's just not the same for them as it is for us, and there's no substitution: MPs need to work. So many graduates emerge from their hothouse degrees in PPE at Oxford or Cambridge, carry a bag for an MP for a few months while they're supported by the bank of mum and dad and, the next thing you know, they're on their way to being one themselves.

If you've worked in another industry or some sort of trade, it gives you knowledge and a skill-set. It doesn't matter whether you're selling cornflakes, driving taxis, or working in a hotel; you will have developed some skills and insights about all sorts of things that would benefit you if you were ever tempted to join the political fray.

I'd like to see a rule come in whereby politicians are obliged to go out and work in industry for a couple of years before they take high office. It's their duty to show that they can run something in the real world and that they understand the responsibilities that ordinary people undertake.

The chancellor of the exchequer ideally needs to have run a corner shop. They need to have had the morning papers out by seven o'clock and the milk delivered by six-thirty. After that, they will realise just how hard it is for us to earn the money that they like to spend. For too long they've thought that money appears simply by making a phone call and stating, 'I'd like to build a battleship.' The reality is that commoners like us have to slave our nuts off to pay our taxes so that they can build these battleships.

After working at real jobs, our leaders should begin to realise that, in order to represent us, they need to know their remits inside-out. We, the public, can tell whether they are on a mission to improve our lives or whether they are motivated by freewheeling ambition.

What we have at present are too many career politicians with no worldly experience, clawing their way through office after office. In fact, we have too many MPs altogether – there are 650 of them, as opposed to 535 Members of Congress for the entire United States of America!

Under the Labour government, we got through so many home secretaries that it was easier just to give them numbers than remember their names: 'Farewell, number three, and come in, number four'; 'Ah, I see number seven has gone, bring on number eight.' There was no time to get attached to them. Their posts seemed like a means to an end, just a step on a ladder.

In the Nick Ferrari Cabinet, if you were made secretary of state for Education, unless you were found fiddling your expenses or you were an al-Qaeda terrorist, you would stay with Education, because you would have invested a great deal of time in learning everything about it, and you would demonstrate an abiding love and passion for it.

A quick turnaround doesn't make sense. We need one politician in one office so that they come to be experts in their field and they can accumulate experience to do the job properly. The way ministers are allocated these days is like taking a publisher and suddenly putting them in charge of milk production, or Northern Ireland, when they don't know the first thing about it.

In political situations regarding complicated and volatile issues that affect every aspect of our families' lives, would you rather trust a twenty-five-year-old policy wonk or someone who has successfully run a business, who might actually know something about how the world works?

Part of the appeal of Nigel Farage is that he has done a proper job. You may like him or loathe him – and many of us are still undecided – but you have to hand it to him: he was a successful stockbroker, he made a lot of money and he's got a big house in Kent. I admire that.

Look at Sajid Javid, MP for Bromsgrove. At the time of writing he's the Conservative Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport. He's possibly the future of the Conservative party, if you ask me.

The son of an immigrant, his father was a Pakistani bus driver and he attended state schools before being the first in his family to go to university, to study politics and economics. A former investment banker, he now has an impressive personal fortune. He sends his children to private school and doesn't make a secret of it: he does what he thinks is best. He calls it exactly the way he sees it, without slavishly following traditional party lines, and people like that. As long as he stays true, I think he is the sort of person who can break through the political mould.

Two other rising stars, for Conservatives and Labour respectively, are Esther McVey and Gloria de Piero; McVey is currently MP for Wirral West and Minister of State for Employment, and de Piero is MP for Ashfield and Shadow Minister for Women and Equalities. Both have been television presenters and they've worked in several jobs as journalists, as well as in other business areas. They will have been exposed to people at the best of times and the worst of times as that's what happens in journalism, particularly when you're on a local paper: you have to interview the widow who's just discovered that her husband's been killed in a hideous crane accident. But you also see the great times, such as when a wonderful old couple are celebrating fifty happy years of marriage, or a family's blind dog on wheels has a litter of fifteen healthy puppies.

Parliament is an insular world and the public perception of this is not helped by the MPs themselves. It was reported recently that the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority recommended an 11 per cent pay increase for MPs, which is wrong when MPs are preaching austerity to everybody else. They're holding pay, they're letting people go, firing people, restricting overtime, so why do they deserve a rise where ordinary hardworking people do not?

Over the years, many MPs have maintained that the price of alcohol should not be raised in the House of Commons bars; bars that are subsidised by UK taxpayers who are riven by the 'cost of living crisis', as politicians themselves like to call it. Obviously, MPs work at the House of Commons, in too many instances they probably sleep with people who also work there, and they drink £1.4m of booze there – well, wouldn't you, if you could buy a pint at about half the usual price in London?

This is galling for the man who does a heavy physical job and wants a pint at the end of the day, who has to cough up nearly a fiver for it, while these Westminster guys, with salaries over seventy grand, are getting theirs on the cheap at the taxpayer's expense. It's hardly an essential spend now, is it?

I don't know if you've ever been to the House of Commons, or to Millbank, but I have, and I can tell you that politicians' sense of their own importance is absolutely all-consuming. The party conferences are a good illustration of this breathtaking insularity. I've attended a few of these over the years, but I'll only go for one day. I can't get out of there quickly enough, because there is no conversation outside of what they're all up to.

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Excerpted from It's Politics ... But Not as We Know It by Nick Ferrari. Copyright © 2015 Nick Ferrari. Excerpted by permission of Elliott and Thompson Limited.
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