One popular movie magazine has a strand of quick-fire interviews called How Much is a Pint of Milk? The idea is to find out whether the stars of the silver screen have their feet on the ground or their head in the clouds.
Jim Paice doesn’t have quite the star quality of a Ryan Gosling or a Michael Fassbender - or even some of his pals in Westminster. You’d expect him to know what milk costs, even if he wasn’t the government minister responsible for Britain’s farms. Yet that was the embarrassing position Paice found himself in on national radio yesterday. His explanation - that his good lady wife, Ava, “buys most of it” - didn’t really boost his credentials as a progressive thinker either.
Still, he’s a busy man, as the ‘latest news’ section of his personal website reveals: ‘Jim urges Council to give green light to full Ely bypass’; ‘Jim and other local MPs launch East Anglian Rail Prospectus’; and, best of all, ‘Jim opens Histon & Impington Feast Festival’.
Today he found the time (and the courage) to address a room full of angry dairy farmers at the emergency summit arranged by the NFU at Westminster’s Central Hall. He demonstrated the rhetorician’s flair so familiar to voters in South East Cambridgeshire by brandishing a pint of milk in the air and declaring that it had cost him (or Ava) the princely sum of 53p. But things turned sour when he asked farmers whether they were doing enough to control their costs. That went down about as well as you’d imagine, being met with a chorus of boos.
Paice was then asked by an audience member whether he wanted to go down in history as dairy’s doctor or its undertaker. He didn’t have much to say about that.
Daily Bread isn’t sure if there’s a collective noun for the crowd today. But ‘an insurrection of dairy farmers’ has a certain ring to it.
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