“Edwina Currie should be the toast of the egg trade – not burnt to a crisp but fêted in champers.”
- Editorial leader from The Grocer 10 December 1988
With all the fuss around Thatcher over the past few weeks, it’s easy to forget about that other brazen (formidable, if you prefer) woman in her government in 1988.
Edwina Currie was just a lowly health minister in title, but her profile rocketed in December 1988 when she warned the public of the danger posed by Salmonella in eggs on national TV. The Grocer itself described her, in the edition following her interview, as “forceful, controversial and insensitive” with a “customary ability to be counter-productive”.
Twenty-five years after ‘Samonellagate’, a trawl through The Grocer archives reveals the true cost of her words. Retailers reported plummeting sales and the government launched a £19m scheme to pay beleaguered egg packers to destroy up to 400 million eggs over a four-week period. The scandal also came at a personal cost to Currie, of course, in forcing her resignation.
But as the saying goes, every cloud has a silver lining. And as The Grocer correctly predicted in its optimistic New Year editorial on 7 January 1989: “It could be that a more streamlined, efficient industry will emerge, and if nothing else, this positive step will be recalled in five years’ time as the only benefit 1988 brought to the egg men.”
This was a point made by Currie herself, 25 years on, when The Grocer caught up with her earlier this week to ask whether she had any regrets, and what she thought of the industry now. Click here to see our filmed Skype interview with Edwina Currie.
For more on the Salmonella crisis 25 years on, see our meat & fish supplement in this week’s edition of The Grocer.
No comments yet