Way back in 1982, I joined The Observer as a young, impressionable journalist. On my first day in the office, I was invited to lunch by one of my much more experienced colleagues. I wasn’t really aware of the lunch culture at national newspapers but, very quickly, as the office emptied just before 1pm, not to fill up again until after 3pm, I understood that this was part of the rhythm of daily life. Friendships were forged, plots were hatched, ideas were refined, people were hired and fired, and a lot of claret was consumed.
Sometimes so much wine was taken that the best-laid schemes were immediately forgotten, even if the conviviality was not. (As an aside, on that first day lunch, my colleague asked me what I would like to drink. “A glass of white wine please,” I said modestly. “Oh, I can’t drink white wine at lunchtime,” came the response. “It keeps me awake in the afternoon.” Ah… the days of yore.)
Nevertheless, for certain trades and professions – newspapers, the law, and especially politics – lunch was a part of the day that was not just about corporeal sustenance: it was an essential feature of working life, a time and place where business could be conducted in a more relaxed, intimate and companionable setting.
(As another aside, so ingrained was the daily ritual of lunch in newspapers that, in 1993, I was fired from The Observer over scallops and pea purée at a restaurant in Chelsea. I’d hardly had a mouthful before the editor of the time told me I was surplus to his requirements. We then had to finish the lunch in embarrassing, smouldering, resentful silence, and I learnt a valuable lesson that day: if you have to sack someone, never do it over lunch.)
This reverie has been provoked by an interview – her first soft focus one – given by the new leader of the Conservative Party, Kemi Badenoch. When asked by The Spectator magazine about how she decompresses, and whether she makes time for lunch, she channelled Gordon Gekko (the anti-hero of the 1987 film Wall Street) by saying: “What’s a lunch break? Lunch is for wimps.”
It’s such a reductive and downbeat thing to say. “I have food brought in and I work and eat at the same time,” she explained.
While she doesn’t exactly live on cheese and pickle sandwiches (“I don’t think sandwiches are a real food,” she says, bafflingly. “Sometimes I will get a steak.”), is this the right example for a putative leader to set? The prospect of politicians – or indeed any office workers – stuck at their desks all day, head down, grabbing a quick bite, unable to breathe in the air of the world outside, is not a healthy one.
That’s not to say that we should be like the French, for whom lunch is such an inalienable article of faith that life stops for two hours in the middle of the day, but I think the promotion of a macho culture at the very top of politics is not to be encouraged. Gekko believed lunch was for wimps because, instead of spending time eating, you should be making money.
Surely, working life is rather more evolved in these post-Covid days, and, in any case, there is sound evidence that well-nourished, refreshed workers are more productive (for example, productivity rates in France, for all the lunch breaks and the plats du jour, are around 10 per cent higher than in the UK).
“There’s no time,” said Badenoch, to explain why she eschews the pleasure and purpose of a “proper” lunch. If she wanted truly to connect with today’s workforce, her message should have been precisely the opposite, that time should be devoted in the middle of the day to a different pace, style and mode of work, and that lunch, as it turns out, is not for wimps but for warriors.
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