Politics
The House Opinion Article | Recipes for disaster: Theresa May’s election mess
3 min read
Politicians making a meal of it. This week: chicken lasagne and boiled potatoes
Pasta or potatoes. Change or stability. You can’t have both.
Let’s be fair. The chicken lasagne and boiled potatoes that were served to Conservative strategists at Chequers in February 2017 weren’t in fact cooked by Theresa May. It’s unclear whether she was even consulted on the menu.
But the meal was one of the things that everyone remembered about the day. Chicken lasagne, rather than beef? And boiled potatoes with it? Was the prime minister carb-loading?
The subject under discussion as they ate was how May would win the general election. Not the 2017 election: the prime minister had made it clear she had no interest in any such thing. The next election was due in 2020, but it was never too early to start thinking about how to fight it.
May had come to office the previous year after David Cameron quit in the wake of the Brexit referendum. Although she’d long wanted the top job, she hadn’t anticipated getting it in these circumstances. Leaving the European Union wasn’t a great animating cause for her. But at the lunch, May’s director of strategy, Chris Wilkins, set out a vision for how the prime minister could harness the Brexit vote as a call for a different kind of Britain. She would present herself as the person fighting for change.
Listening to this unhappily as he chewed his chicken and pasta was Lynton Crosby, a man always referred to as “Tory election guru”. He had an objection: prime ministers can’t be the candidates of change. They are, by definition, the candidates of more of the same.
At this point, it was a philosophical question. The election was three years away. By 2020, it might well have become obvious that it would be hard to offer someone in post for four years as a change. Especially up against Jeremy Corbyn, always the changeiest man in the room.
Chicken lasagne is nice, especially the way my wife makes it, with the meat shredded and cooked in pesto. And boiled potatoes, with a little butter, have their place.
Together, they’re a lot.
After one serving, a normally ravenous teenager declared himself full and then lay very still on the sofa.
In the weeks that followed that Chequers lunch, May would have a change of heart. In April, she would take the nation by surprise and announce a snap general election. At the time, everyone agreed it was a masterstroke.
But much like chicken lasagne and boiled potatoes, the election campaign landed on the public with a thud. Unable to decide whether to follow the strategy of Wilkins or Crosby, May’s team ended up doing both: the manifesto was radical; the slogan was reassuring. When the manifesto proved too radical, parts of it were dumped. Worried about looking weak, the prime minister denied this had happened.
In the course of the short campaign, May would be the strong and stable candidate who U-turned on a central election pledge, and the change candidate who insisted that nothing had changed. And rather than winning a stonking majority, she came within a whisker of losing Downing Street.
Was it the fault of the pasta, or the potatoes? In the weeks that followed the result, both sides of the meal would brief aggressively – and entertainingly – that the result wasn’t on them. Everyone could point to a part of the campaign they’d opposed. Or perhaps it was the element of surprise: the only thing worse than chicken lasagne and boiled potatoes is chicken lasagne and boiled potatoes that come out of nowhere.
But one lesson is clear: serve either pasta, or potatoes. Be continuity, or change. No one can swallow both.
