Column

The great egg debate: was the Left off on the wrong scent?

By smelling blue blood all over the great egg debate, the Left ended up missing an opportunity to intervene positively, says Martin Jacques in this first healthmatters column open to guest writers

Two incidents stick in my mind when I look back at public reaction to Edwina Currie’s fabled outspokenness.

The first was at the Labour Party conference just after her advice to northerners to modify their eating habits.

Delegates and visitors were invited to write their comments about the then junior minister on a newly- painted wall. It was plastered with comments from one end to the other. There was not a single remark that could escape the charge of sexism.

The second incident was on the Radio 4 Today programme the day after her egg statement. The banter among the male presenters that morning was full of innuendo and implication that would have been simply out of order if the source of the controversy had been a man.

It was a reminder that, notwithstanding Mrs Thatcher, the world of Westminster remains deeply male.

The point of these anecdotes is to argue that the debate over Mrs Currie has always been highly-gendered. And the Left has been as guilty as anyone else on this score.

The problem is to sort out what kind of political figure Edwina Currie actually is.

I don’t think the answer is a simple one. Although she owes her promotion — and her subsequent dismissal of course — to Mrs Thatcher, she is no ideological Thatcherite. Indeed, unlike Mrs T, she is not a very ideological person at all.

Rather, the characteristic of Thatcherism she most obviously displays, and with great skill, is populism. She has a capacity for blunt speaking which touches a chord, and which makes itself heard — be it by antagonising people or educating them.

In this context, her role as a health minister was of particular significance. We live in an era in which there has been a growing recognition of the importance of personal responsibility in health matters, be it diet, smoking, drinking, drugs or exercise.

Mrs Currie was the first government figure, arguably the first prominent political figure, to become identified with, and be the advocate of, personal responsibility in health.

Such a role can range far and wide. It can mean, as it did in her statement on old people keeping warm, a patronising attitude towards those less fortunate. It can involve, as it did in her outburst on northern eating habits, a dismissal of the social causes of bad dietary patterns. Though in each case, it should be said, there was a kernel of truth in what she was arguing. It can also mean, as it did in the great egg debate, an attack on the food industry, the most effective exposure in recent times of the farming lobby and its relationship to the Ministry of Agriculture.

There is now a widespread and belated recognition, not least on the Left, that Mrs Currie has been hard done by. Yet people on the Left have been as guilty as others in failing to understand the kind of ambiguous political figure she always was during her period as junior health minister.

Sexism made her an easy target, or at least appeared to.

A consistent downgrading of the politics of personal health made the Left less attentive than it should have been to the positive messages in Mrs Currie’s outpourings.

When it came to the egg affair, the Left smelt blue blood and didn’t think twice. Robin Cook, one of the most intelligent of Labour politicians and who should have known better, led the charge and called for her resignation.

By putting narrow party considerations before political principle, by allowing knee-jerk reactions to override a more balanced appraisal of the argument, yet again the Left missed an opportunity to intervene in what became one of the great political debates of the third term. O me miserum!