I HAVE a confession to make: I do not know the price of milk.
Like David Cameron and George Osborne, if you believe the withering assessment of their Conservative colleague Nadine Dorries MP (“two posh boys who don’t know the price of milk”), I am living in a blissful bubble of milky ignorance. I am a dairy dunce. I am lactose intransigent.
Before you turn the page in disgust, furious that the Liverpool Post would entrust to someone so unworldly the vital task of taking a sideways look at the week’s news, allow me to clarify: I am NOT posh.
A touch middle-class, perhaps – I did once refer to a bowl of Scouse as “casserole” – but certainly not proper posh. Not David and George posh. I have no title, no country pile, and none of my furniture is inherited, unless you count that nest of coffee tables from my nan. And they’re MFI.
Nor is my ignorance due to me living some blissful 1950s idyll, in which I leave the purchase of kitchen comestibles to my good lady wife. If only. On the contrary, I am quite the new man, and go shopping on a regular basis.
This is why I am ideally placed to state the following fact: there is no “price of milk”. It is ephemeral, an ever-changing number plucked from the air depending on a million variables: is there a BOGOF deal? Are they pushing that filtered nonsense? Can you justify bulk buying 16 gallons? Does the eternal price war ebb or flow in your favour today?
Only a fool bothers to remember a price that will be different tomorrow.
Besides, when did it become so important for the Prime Minister to do his own shopping? Frankly, I would much rather Dave was in the office, authorising drone attacks on Al-Qaeda camps or putting Greece on eBay, than queuing at his local Tesco Express, weeping silent tears of rage while he waits for some cack-handed imbecile to use the automatic check-out. (They are no longer new. There is no excuse.)
This insidious pressure for our political leaders to be “just like us” is what causes them to waste their valuable time “web-chatting” about biscuits with the Mumsnet harpies, or joshing with Jeremy Vine about how much they love association football, when they could be solving actual problems.
So, please, let’s unfetter our elected leaders from the charade of pretending to be normal. They are not normal. They are vastly more intellectual, informed and ambitious than you or I, or indeed some shouty backbencher like Nadine Dorries, which is how they came to be living in Downing Street. They simply do not have time to chunter on about the trivial stuff that we do.
It is time to accept that we are the milk and they are the cream. And, no, I don’t know the price of that either.
