by Ed Balls
SPANISH OMELETTE
Serves 4
I’ve only been a best man once, when my friends, Tom and Brigit, were married in southern Spain. Brigit’s family had retired to live in a tiny white mountain village called Casares, where she had spent a year off learning Spanish, and the whole village opened its arms wide to welcome her and all of us when we arrived for the celebrations. The speech I made, with my co-best man Murray, was very long and probably best forgotten. But it was a spectacular weekend. Tom and Brigit had timed their ceremony to coincide with the village’s annual August festival, the ‘Ferrier’. Each year the whole village ate, drank and danced all night for three nights running and we all joined in, filling the twin squares and all the surrounding bars.
The wedding breakfast was lovely, local Spanish food. But the culinary highlight of that weekend was a freshly cooked Spanish omelette. Tortilla Española tastes especially good in the early hours of the morning after a long night of eating, drinking and dancing. It should be simple and salty, perfect for soaking up Spanish beer. This is the local recipe that Brigit learned in the village and taught me so I can relive that happy night.
INGREDIENTS
200ml olive oil
2 large potatoes, peeled and diced
6 eggs, lightly whisked
Salt and pepper
(Optional: 2 garlic cloves, peeled and finely chopped; 5cm of chorizo, skinned and chopped; 1 green or red pepper, de-seeded and chopped; or a few sliced mushrooms)
METHOD
Heat the olive oil in a wok or heavy-bottomed pan and when it’s hot add the diced potatoes. Cook on a medium heat for 10 minutes or so until soft but not too brown. Remove with a slotted spoon and sit on kitchen roll to cool and drain.
Meanwhile, put 2 tablespoons of the oil into a big frying pan and heat (at this point, if using garlic, chorizo, peppers or mushrooms, you would fry them until soft and add them to the egg mixture). Put the potatoes into the egg mixture, mix, add salt and pepper and pour into the frying pan.
This is where it is always a bit tricky. You want a medium heat and for the omelette to cook through without burning. I reckon after about 7 minutes, it’s time to turn. Put a big plate over the top of the cooking tortilla – it will still be runny on top – and flip the frying pan. Slide the omelette back into the pan, tucking the sides in to make it neat. Cook for a further 4 minutes, but keep checking for burning. Then slide onto a plate or board. Eat straight away, but let the tortilla cool a little first as you open another cerveza.
4 POLITICAL EATING
‘You must come round to my little flat on Saturday,’ Peter Mandelson smiled. ‘We’ll have some lunch and talk about your future.’ As a 26-year-old Financial Times journalist, here I was, the year after Labour’s shock 1992 election defeat, being summoned by one of the party’s most influential and controversial figures for a one-on-one meeting to persuade me to give up journalism and work for Gordon Brown and the Labour Party. It was the most exciting lunch invitation I’d ever received.
We ate in the kitchen of his Wilmington Square flat in central London, minutes away from Sadler’s Wells Theatre on Rosebery Avenue, where Peter was a patron. Everything was pristine – the neat kitchen, beautiful plates, crisp napkins – and the lunch was equally simple, small and exquisite: tomato soup, crusty French bread, and a little green salad with baby tomatoes and a lightly tossed vinaigrette.
As someone of my appetite would, I ate it all, assuming it was the starter, but – perfect as it was – that was the full lunch. If I was hosting someone, I’d have wanted to leave them turning down a third helping of dessert, but this was a different world, and as the years have passed, I realised that was the point. Lunch was on Peter’s terms, and he used it to size me up, make a strong impression, and tell me what my future should look like.
That’s what they call establishing a power dynamic, and the fact that I can remember it so vividly almost thirty years on shows he did a good job. The actual lunch we ate that day was important insofar as it communicated something about Peter’s aesthetic, but beyond that, it was just a way of providing a social, informal and personal backdrop to a dialogue which, if it had taken place in his office or in a meeting room, would have felt more like a job interview.
Over the next few years, I learned that those kinds of meetings between political colleagues were often held over lunch or dinner as a deliberate means of defusing what might otherwise be tense or difficult discussions, or as a subconscious way of the host asserting their power over a guest, right down to imposing the choice of restaurant, table or wine. Indeed, what I rapidly discovered, to my immense disappointment, was that in politics, unlike the rest of my life, food is very rarely about food. Or, to be slightly less philosophical, food is everywhere in politics, and plays a crucial role in so many of its processes and interactions, but the actual enjoyment of what is on the plate is considered pretty irrelevant.
In 1994, when Tony Blair suggested that he and Gordon Brown meet at the Granita restaurant near Tony’s home in Islington to discuss how to handle the Labour leadership vacancy that arose after the tragic death of John Smith, the food was the last thing on either of their minds. A good thing in Gordon’s case, since I could tell from the moment we walked in that it was not his type of place. The menu was short and Mediterranean. ‘What exactly is polenta?’ he asked me gruffly.
I made my excuses after their starters arrived and left the two of them alone, but the fact that Gordon did much more talking than eating during that fateful dinner was evidenced by the way he wolfed down a steak and chips immediately afterwards back in Westminster while giving me and others his version of the conversation. It’s hard to imagine such a dinner happening these days – the two leading candidates to be the next leader of the opposition, most likely the next prime minister, sitting together in a restaurant on Islington’s Upper Street working out the future. Today a picture would be on Twitter or Instagram within minutes. Back then it was an Evening Standard diarist, sitting two tables down, who got the scoop. Nothing in politics ever stays private.
Gordon finally agreed at that dinner to stand aside for Tony Blair in the Labour leadership contest. Tony may well have intimated that he would eventually stand down and hand over to Gordon. Gordon may even have believed him. But that wasn’t the ‘deal’ Gordon was after that evening. He went into Granita determined to secure his own control over economic and social policy and make Tony’s leadership a partnership between the two of them. That was what the press were told the next day as they staged a photograph walking together by Westminster Hall – and while this may be an unfashionable view, I do believe their partnership, turbulent as it was at times, worked considerably better for the nation than the Prime Minister-Chancellor relationships that followed. Both were hugely talented and driven and needed the challenge each provided to the other, however uncomfortable that was at times. When this kind of challenge and compromise is absent, bad decisions follow.
That Granita dinner is one very famous example of food not really being about the food in politics, but there are countless more. In the canteens and dining rooms of Parliament, food is a chance to gather with your tribe. When I first visited the Members’ Dining Room after being elected in 2005, I moved towards the nearest table, but my arm was grabbed by a fellow Labour MP. ‘That’s for the Tories,’ he said. He explained that the tables at one end were for the Conservatives, at the other end for Labour, with a middle table for the Lib Dems. If you were going to eat there, you did it as part of your political group, in your tribe, in your family. It was for bonding, not just food.
If a group of MPs wanted to get together for a more surreptitious discussion instead, perhaps about the future of their party leader, they can’t just book a meeting room or all assemble in one of their living rooms, otherwise the immediate question is: ‘What are you plotting?’ So it’s far safer simply to arrange a dinner. After all, what could be more innocuous than a group of colleagues going out for a meal to get aw
ay from Westminster and unwind from work? The problem being that this trick has now become so ubiquitous that if two or more politicians are spotted dining together anywhere outside Parliament, the assumption is that they must be plotting, even if they’re not.
So you can see how, amid all these machinations, the food just becomes an afterthought. One of the most notorious political dinners of recent years came in 2006, when Tom Watson and a group of his fellow West Midlands MPs met in an upmarket Indian restaurant in Wolverhampton, twelve years on from the ‘Granita Summit’, to discuss their dissatisfaction with Tony Blair. Tony had just announced his intention to stay for another full term in power, having won a historic third general election the year before, but Tom and others felt he needed to take responsibility for the damage done by the Iraq War. The political implications of that gathering have reverberated for years. But ask any of the individuals involved in the so-called Curry House Plot what the chicken balti was like that night, and they’ll struggle to remember.
The same is true of the famous ‘Westminster lunches’ between politicians and journalists: the traditional way that titbits of political gossip, or more substantive revelations about policy and personnel, find their way from the corridors of Whitehall and Parliament into the pages of the next day’s newspapers or the headlines on the evening bulletins. I was never a huge fan of these lunches, in part because I found it very difficult to relax and talk naturally about the issues and personalities of the day while having to preface every sentence by saying whether or not what I was saying could be repeated, reported or quoted. A few times, I tried issuing a blanket injunction over the starters that ‘I assume this is all off the record’, but even that means a journalist can still report what you’ve told them, just not in the form of a quote.
If that made those lunches all much more trouble than they were worth, the other reason I wasn’t a fan was that – again – the food was very rarely anything special. Whereas most high-class restaurants in London live and die by the quality of their cuisine, what Westminster restaurants trade on is largely the ability to have discreet conversations. As for the food they served, I’d usually have my mum’s voice in my ear: ‘I could make better than this for half the price at home.’ Or, in the case of most Westminster restaurants, probably a tenth of the price.
The other bastion of Westminster eating, and the scourge of many MPs’ waistlines, is the political reception. Dozens of these take place in the weeks when Parliament is in session, especially in the run-up to the summer and Christmas holidays. Some of them are hosted by individual ministers or government departments, but many more are put on by trade bodies, media outlets, parliamentary groupings and the like to bend the ear of politicians in an informal setting, and as an MP you sometimes have to attend at a rate of three or four a day in some busy weeks. These receptions are famous for their lukewarm wine, even in the depths of winter, the result of being held in the ancient facilities around Parliament where refrigeration and ice are at a premium. And if the wine is usually disappointing, the food is not normally much better, occasionally needing to be swerved entirely for health reasons where prawns and salmon are concerned.
By far the least memorable culinary experiences when I was in my early career in politics, however, tended to lie away from Westminster, in what was – for good reason – known as the ‘rubber chicken circuit’ of constituency dinners and local fundraisers all around the country. Usually held on a Thursday or Friday in a local village hall, function room or sports club, the guest speaker would tour the tables with the local candidate, draw the raffle, make a speech, and then head off on the long journey home before last orders at the bar. Now obviously you’re not expecting a feast for the ages at an event like that – it was usually cheap, cheerful and enjoyable fare. Apart from anything, if the idea is to raise money, then the organisers don’t want to defeat their own purpose with expensive catering.
Personally, I could never share that rationale because my attitude to local party gatherings was the complete opposite. In my view, you had one, perhaps two chances every year to put on a real bash to thank the volunteers who went out knocking on doors and handing out leaflets with you, the local businesses who donated raffle prizes, and other supporters who’d done their bit in recent months. Those events therefore became one of the culinary highlights of the local calendar if I had anything to do with organising them. And from 1997 onwards, I took as my inspiration – or perhaps my springboard to reach greater heights – the unforgettable buffet we had in Yvette’s constituency to celebrate our engagement.
Victory in 1997 was a dream come true for me, the first election of a Labour government in my adult lifetime. I could remember the two 1974 Heath–Wilson elections: we had a Harold Wilson poster in our window and my dad took me out delivering leaflets in Norwich. After that, though, it was one disappointment after another – with Margaret Thatcher’s three victories and Labour’s surprise defeat by John Major in 1992, which had a big influence on my decision to go and work in the Treasury for Labour. At the very beginning of the 1997 General Election campaign, the MP for Pontefract & Castleford suddenly announced he was standing down, and Yvette – still just twenty-eight – decided to stand. After a whirlwind five days, Yvette won the vote at a packed selection meeting of local Labour party members. This young economist had taken on a group of older, more experienced and better connected men, and beaten them all. I spent the election campaign working in party headquarters, but on election day, having met the Permanent Secretary to the Treasury in Whitehall to hand over a large pile of policy papers detailing our plans, I got the train up to Doncaster to be with Yvette as the polls closed nationwide and her own local victory was confirmed.
In the immediate whirlwind after the 1997 election, our instinctive decision to get engaged seemed like par for the course. But it did mean that, three weeks after the election, we ended up combining Yvette’s ‘thank-you’ party for her supporters at Castleford Civic Centre with our engagement celebration for our family and friends. Double the celebration, of course, meant double the food, and that party remains the greatest buffet I have ever seen, because – like all buffets – its quality is judged by its scale. A decent buffet is big. A good buffet is huge. But a great buffet is the size you usually only see in 1930s cartoons, with a hungry schoolboy or a slavering dog staring in at the window: gigantic pyramids of sausage rolls, pork pies, cocktail sausages, ham sandwiches and scotch eggs. Of course, there is sometimes some lettuce in the corner, a nod to healthy eating, and perhaps some cheese rolls for the vegetarians, but, fundamentally, these buffets are all about processed pork. I had rarely seen a more satisfied crowd of party-goers than that evening in Castleford, let alone all the local kids who woke up to the leftovers taken home by their parents.
The following year, we held a garden party for party members and supporters at our house to thank them for their hard work over the past year and raise some much-needed funds for the campaign coffers. My in-laws had just bought me an American-style two-chamber BBQ for my birthday, engineered just like a big steam engine. I cooked a fourteen-hour pulled pork BBQ for Yvette’s constituents, using the recipes I’d picked up during my post-university years in America.
The fire was lit at 11 p.m. the night before, with a rota of party members drawn up to tend it overnight – 11 p.m. to 2 a.m., 2 a.m. to 5 a.m., 5 a.m. to 8 a.m. – and keep the pork cooking. When I started to serve it up at lunchtime the next day with a spicy North Carolina-style sauce, some people looked aghast, and I got a few requests for ketchup, mustard or apple sauce instead. But a little taste was enough to persuade almost everyone.
Our BBQ has now been lit every year for twenty-three years of constituency garden parties. Generations of teenagers have volunteered to spend the early hours in our back garden tending the coals – the longest-serving veteran of those overnight vigils is now in her early forties. Even when the restrictions kicked in during the pandemic in 2020, we delivered the sandwiches by car to members’
houses instead so they could eat their spicy pulled pork while on the garden party Zoom chat.
This was also the pulled pork BBQ I was preparing the night before our William and Kate royal wedding street party in 2011, when, while getting all the last-minute extras the evening before in Castleford’s Asda, I got distracted and accidentally tweeted my own name. ‘You’re still trending,’ our teenage fire-tenders kept reminding me that night… and all the next day. I’m still waiting for people to forget about that moment, but Ed Balls Day still comes around on Twitter every year.
Yvette’s election in 1997 turned our lives upside down. Suddenly we lived in two places, two hundred miles apart, having to be in Westminster during the week and back in Yorkshire at the weekend. And our long working days, me at the Treasury, her in Parliament, meant cooking Nigel Slater recipes at home on a weekday evening went straight out of the window. While Yvette ate with her new parliamentary mates in the House of Commons as she waited for that night’s votes, I just grabbed something quick when I got home – a bacon sandwich or beans on toast. Many times I woke up in the middle of the night – 2 or 3 in the morning – to find she still wasn’t back. I’d sleepily ring the 24-hour House of Commons switchboard and mumble into the receiver – ‘Are they still sitting?’ – before turning over and going back to sleep.
I spent eight years as a Treasury adviser at the heart of government from 1997 onwards, working closely with both Gordon Brown and Tony Blair, and was promoted to be chief economic adviser to the Treasury, one of those historic formal titles that probably made most people in Westminster shrug, but which I felt very proud to ring and tell my mum and dad about on the evening it was confirmed. I loved those years at the Treasury: introducing big reforms from the national minimum wage and tax credits to independence for the Bank of England and more money for the NHS; slaving for months each year planning the UK’s annual Budget; struggling with No10 to keep the Blair-Brown relationship on the rails; representing the UK in international meetings all round the world; working with hugely talented civil servants, advisers and ministers; and – vitally if you ask me – ensuring Britain didn’t join the Euro. And the Treasury staff canteen was excellent too. But being an adviser wasn’t enough. As I knew from watching Yvette, both locally and in Westminster, the really hard thing was to put your neck on the line in Parliament and be held accountable for your own decisions. In 2004, I was selected to be the Labour candidate for Normanton, next door to Yvette’s constituency, and I went about building the kind of local operation that I’d seen first-hand for seven years with Yvette.