Cameron And His Daily Bread

Nick Ferrari writes for the Daily Express. That tells you all you need to know about where, politically, the LBC host is likely to be coming from. So for Young Dave to fetch up on the Ferrari show and come up short under some rather straightforward questioning does not look good. And, once again, his Achilles heel is the subject raised so memorably by (yes, it’s her again) Nadine Dorries.

The fragrant Nadine characterised Cameron, and his pal the Rt Hon Gideon George Oliver Osborne, heir to the seventeenth Baronet, as “two posh boys who don't know the price of milk”. So Cameron was asked by Ferrari about the price of everyday foodstuffs – like how much a “value loaf” costs at a typical supermarket. He did not know, and his guess (over £1) was way out (it’s 47p).

Now, those of us who do our own shopping, and insist on knowing what we will have to pay on passing through the till, know this (and that a four pint carton of milk costs £1 – well, it does at my local Aldi). So does that new category of “voters likely to be targeted by politicians seeking power”, the Aldi Mums, who shop at what are termed Discounters because their purchasing power has taken a hit of late.

And that purchasing power does not extend to purchasing bread makers on a whim, along with seeking out local artisan flour. We’re talking about folks who have the money to buy the shopping, and no more. So what Cameron said to Nick Ferrari after he failed to guess the price of a value loaf was yet more cringeworthy, and more likely to reinforce Nadine Dorries’ characterisation.

As soon as Young Dave declared that he had a bread maker, you could hear the quips: “that means he has a chap to do that sort of thing for him”. It got worse: did the Cameron bread maker get paid the minimum wage? Then he talked of “the flour made in my constituency - Cotswold Crunch - you get some of that, beautifully milled in the Cotswolds, you pop that in your breadmaker”.

By this point, anyone listening who did not have the funds to send out for a Panasonic breadmaker had already decided that they agreed with Nadine (I nearly talked about popping in to the nearest Argos to buy one, but then, this is probably another concept alien to the Prime Minister). That may help the current MP for Mid Bedfordshire, but it is otherwise terrible news for the Tory Party.

If Lynton Crosby really did have that fabled political nous, he would already have rustled up a list of items and their prices – and made sure every Tory MP and PPC knew that committing it to memory was A Very Good Thing and A Very High Priority as well. Not knowing what the basics cost, and, moreover, not appearing to be overly fussed about that fact, isn’t going to win over the Aldi Mums.

So that’s another reason not to vote Tory. Not a clever move there, Dave.