Eating on the Right

Is there such a thing as a right wing diet?

My good friend Oisín Rogers, who now runs London’s hottest ticket in the form of The Devonshire in Soho, used to be landlord of the venerable Guinea Grill in Mayfair. When he was there, Nigel Farage was a regular and it was noticed that he was using the pub – in a lane just off Bond Street – for business meetings. Oisín asked him not to do so and, he tells me, Farage agreed immediately and with very good grace. He was always, according to Oisín, exceptionally polite.

That’s the thing about Farage. Unlike his hero, Trump, he has good drawing room manners while still being a bit of a shit. What concerns me here, though, is his eating (and drinking) habits rather than his alleged incitement of race riots in England, pathological hatred of the EU, political populism and his appeal to the worst instincts of the British people.

This is because I have developed in an interest in the diets of the far right. Given that we are supposed to be what we eat, what makes someone diametrically opposed to political correctness (aka, in my view, common decency) or what they like to call “wokeness”? Or is it just a lack of interest in food in terms of culture? In other words, eating to live, rather than living to eat.

Farage is a fan of the Proper Fucking Lunch or PFL and he is said to have one of these once a week. I suspect he might fit in rather more than that. It’s hard to pin down exactly what constitutes a PFL for Farage, but it seems to involve beer as an aperitif – consumed with a certain amount of nicotine – and nothing too multi-cultural thereafter. His affection for claret – as many of us English speakers of a certain age like to call the red wines of Bordeaux – is a rare nod to Europe.

Speaking of Europe, Farage’s excuse for missing so many votes when he was in the European Parliament, was that he need a proper lunch. Unlike the French and Italians, of course, who invented the proper lunch.

When he lunched with the Financial Times and The Irish Times, several pints (and cigarettes) preceded the meal, there was claret with it and – in the case of the FT – some port to follow. Farage appears to have a cast iron liver.

Lunching with The Irish Times, gin and tonic was the aperitif as Boisdale, the Belgravia restaurant, doesn’t do draft beer. I ate there once, with an editor who had a chip on his shoulder about his parents having not sent him to Eton. The place seemed to be full of men of a certain age wearing red corduroy trousers. The food was decent and hearty.

Farage ordered Sauvignon Blanc with his crispy squid and turned down grouse as a main course on the basis that he had too much of it recently. It was steak and chips to follow. With claret, natch. When he lunched with the FT, he had something called “stewed cheese” followed by a pork chop and “a sausage”. The wine match for the cheese was what the FT calls, infuriatingly, just “a bottle of wine.” Was it a Sauvignon Blanc? Possibly. A former colleague of his has said that Farage’s PFLs involve two bottles per person, minimum. Anyway, we shall return to Sauvignon Blanc.

The FT lunch was in Simpson’s Tavern, just off Cornhill in the City of London, an establishment dating from 1757. It was forced to close by its landlord just before I could get there, back in 2022.

Farage has a certain charm despite being, as far as I am concerned, quite beyond the Pale and, in the words of my great-aunt, “rather common”, but he does seem to enjoy eating. And certainly drinking. His enthusiasm for chlorinated chicken, I feel sure, does not extend to eating the stuff but it sits well with what Andrew Rawnsley calls his peddling of the politics of grievance.

Liz Truss, the only Prime Minister of the United Kingdom to run the possibility of being detained in a secure facility for the terminally bewildered, is said to run mainly on espressos (or espressi, I suppose) which could explain a lot. She requires many doubles served, bizarrely, in a cup normally used for flat whites. So, she must like her espresso to be very lungo or just a smear in the bottom of the cup.

In the UK, such coffee could be from Pret a Manger, otherwise it was required to be sourced from independent coffee shops. A former staffer has referred to her – with a degree of exaggeration – as drinking “42,000 espressos a day”. And The Guardian reports that anything served to her must never, ever involve mayonnaise.

Truss’s favourite meal, we are told, is a meatball Subway with melted cheese and her “rider” for overnight stays when she was Foreign Secretary, was a chilled bottle of Sauvignon Blanc. When people say just Sauvignon Blanc they invariably mean the super-pungent style that generally comes from Marlborough in New Zealand. This is largely a wine for people who don’t really like white wine, who don’t appreciate the subtle, mineral-streaked style of Loire Sauvignons or the chalky dryness of Chablis. These classic French wines are too subtle, I suspect, for Truss and Farage. I mean does anyone associate subtlety with this pair?

The absurd Jacob Rees-Mogg, former leader of the House of Commons and MP for North Somerset has claimed that he has a ham and cheese baguette and a chocolate éclair for lunch every day in London, but this was during his ill-fated campaign to retain his seat; it may have been a vain stab at populism. But we do know from the tv series Meet the Reese-Moggs that he doesn’t like vegetables or “onions or things like that”.

During the school holidays, he requires his children to dine on Sunday evenings in black tie (or the equivalent for the girls). The Rees-Mogg children are very long suffering (as is Mrs R-M), and I have a feeling that the little force of nature that is Sixtus may well rebel in time.

Given his enthusiastic support for a no-holds-barred trade deal with the United States and his approval of chlorine-washed chicken, one imagines he and his brood tucking into one while formally attired. Oh, and he has dreadful taste in wine glasses; and probably wine too.

My dear friend, the late and much loved Tomás Clancy would have understood what I mean by this. He was perhaps the best wine writer this island has ever produced and he liked his steak – shock! horror! – well done, positively grey within, without even the faintest trace of pink. So, clearly wanting your steak well done, to the point of virtual cremation, does not make you a bad person. Far from it.

But a lot of bad people like well-done steak, including Donald Trump. In fact, steak is perhaps the most natural thing that he eats, preferring to feed on McDonalds, KFC and pizza. His steak has to be overcooked and and served without any “garbage”, i.e. green stuff. The meat is smothered in ketchup, presumably to hide its actual taste. On the rare occasion when he agrees to eat a salad, he is said to drown it in thousand island dressing, a combination of mayonnaise, ketchup and chopped pickles with a hefty payload of sugar.

Trump has a notoriously sweet tooth and seems to have an Oreo cookie dependency. He has been reported to drink up to 30 Diet Cokes a day and, as we now know, has a button on his desk which he can press to summon a fresh one.

Elon Musk, like Trump, doesn’t seem to like the taste of steak, although there are no reports of his wanting it overcooked. Instead, he likes a steak dry-aged with ssamjang, a sweet Korean fermented chilli sauce. So despite his claims to love “French cuisine”, one imagines that he doesn’t get – or do, for that matter – subtlety. His other food loves, it seems, are döner kebabs, Hawaiian pizza (i.e. ham and pineapple) and doughnuts (although he would spell it donuts).

Although he does drink alcohol, his favourite beverage, by far, is Diet Coke or Coke Zero, and he admits to drinking “gallons” of it. He once posted a photo of his bedside table littered with empty Diet Coke cans. This habit may partly explain why he uses ketamine to relax.

Anyway, two of the most unpleasant people on the planet consume mind-boggling amounts of Diet Coke. Causation or correlation? I suspect they just don’t give much consideration to what they eat or drink, and not in the ascetic way that the saintly might do so. When you don’t care about such things, I suspect that there’s a gap in the personality, a lack of taste. And their outlandish devotion to Coca-Cola suggests a kind of infantilism. Toddler Syndrome, perhaps.

Tasteless is a pretty apt description of that pair. Just for starters, so to speak.

Adolf Hitler did little to popularise vegetarianism but there are reports that he would eat an occasional liver dumpling. Like Vladimir Putin (whose grandfather, incidentally was chef to Stalin) he had a not wholly unfounded fear of being poisoned. As a result, he had a team of 15 food tasters, all women, who had to eat everything that would be offered to him 45 minutes before each meal.

He was fond of pasta and eiernockl, an Austrian egg dumpling, but towards the end of his life he is said to have lived on mashed potatoes and broth, possibly because his alimentary tract was destroyed by the astonishing cocktail of drugs he was given every day. It has been suggested that he embraced vegetarianism in response to what sounds like a form of irritable bowel syndrome, a combination of flatulence and constipation. I can’t find any reference to him eating pulses but a Hitler Youth leaflet encouraged the consumption of soya beans, calling them “Nazi beans”. (I don’t like them much myself, but I wouldn’t go that far.)

Mussolini appears to have had a tendency towards vegetarianism although did he did enjoy grilled veal marinated with fresh oregano. He was not a fan of pasta, believing it made the Italians sluggish. One dish, if you can call it that, that he loved was sliced garlic dressed with lemon juice and olive oil, a whole bowl of it. When he ate this, his wife would sleep in another room. Like Hitler, Mussolini suffered from chronic gastrointestinal problems – and I have a feeling – just a hunch – that Trump does too.

Finally, Margaret Thatcher (whom I hesitate somewhat to mention in this company) seems to have been a relatively keen cook and she was famous for what she called her “mystery starter” which was, in fact Snaffles Mousse, invented in the eponymous Dublin restaurant which was opened by a group of friends in 1968, closing in 1985. It was located in a basement on Lower Leeson Street which is now a gym. How Lady Thatcher got hold of the recipe I will never know.

The Snaffles team comprised Rosie and Nicholas Tinné, Arthur “Cobby” Knight and wine merchant Jim FitzGerald. The Tinnés, who did the cooking, bought the others out in 1972.

The mousse was a perennial favourite in the restaurant and featured frequently in my late mother-in-law’s repertoire. She, unlike me, was a great admirer of the Iron Lady. Rosie Tinné published a book, Irish Country House Cooking, in 1974; it owes quite a lot to Lady Maclean’s Cookbook, using, amongst her own, recipes from rather grand friends, printed beneath the letter heading on their writing paper. I’ve reproduced the relevant page below. And it’s much more pleasant than it sounds but, if tempted to make it, do use rather more than a pinch of curry powder.

I am most grateful to @ashbrook_londonderry on Instagram for pointing me towards the 1971 Good Food Guide Dinner Party Book in which the recipe appears as Snaffles Mousse. No doubt the Iron Lady had a copy.