It’s a new year and thousands have resolved to lose weight, join a gym and get fit. What can our politicians teach us about diet?
As Nigella Lawson finishes telling us how to have a super-sexy, calorie-crammed Christmas, it’s hard to remember that her father made a name for himself by losing weight. Former Chancellor of the Exchequer Nigel Lawson piled on the pounds while in office.
He weighed 17 stone when he finally cut out booze, fatty food and dairy products. He dropped five stone, wrote the Nigel Lawson Diet Book and, for a while, was almost as famous as his daughter.
Lawson was one of the first leading politicians to confess to taking an interest in diet and fitness. Winston Churchill lived on Champagne and Havana cigars and only used the word diet metaphorically. In a rare movement of modesty he declared, “In the course of my life, I have often had to eat my words, and I must confess that I have always found it a wholesome diet.”
The French do things differently. The former French president Francois Mitterrand was famed for his illegal feasts. He loved to gorge on ortolan, a small, protected species of songbird, hunted to the verge of extinction. Traditionally it is steeped in brandy before being cooked whole. The diner eats it with a napkin over his head – either to capture the aroma, or to lessen the messy effects of eating a small bird bones and all.
Less disgusting, and certainly not criminal, was Ronald Reagan’s dietary weakness. When he gave up smoking he took to jelly babies. Once in the White House he kept a jar on his desk for Cabinet meetings. “You can tell a lot about a fella’s character by whether he picks out all of one colour or just grabs a handful,” he said.
Tony Blair was as careful about his culinary as about his political image. He informed the Labour Party magazine that his favourite dish was fish and chips. Meanwhile, in the Islington Cookbook he sang the praises of fresh fettucine garnished with an exotic sauce of olive oil, sun-dried tomatoes and capers.
Gordon Brown obviously relishes Blair’s description of him as the big clunking fist. He has listed his number one dish as rumbledthumps, a Scottish term for a meal mixed together – rumbled – and bashed together – thumped.
This summer, when things were looking their worst for him, he took a personal trainer on his month-long summer holiday, and went on pre-breakfast jogs, trailed by a band of jogging police protection officers.
He also used the time to break his addiction to the bowls of KitKats and biscuits that adorn almost every spare inch of shelf space in Downing Street. He has, however, not gone to the lengths that former Tory leader William Hague did. In 1997 Hague was called a wimp, when he took twice as long off to recover from a sinus operation as Churchill had for a stroke.
To fight back he and his chief of staff Seb Coe, took up judo. Fitter, leaner and swearing he had grown an inch in height, Hague went on to become collect any number of highly paid directorships, and a lucrative place on the after-dinner speech circuit. And Seb Coe won the job of heading up Britain’s successful bid for the
Olympics and was given a peerage for his efforts.
But is a fit politician necessarily a good role model? Over the last few years the politician who has got his kit off almost as often as a Page Three girl has been Vladimir Putin.
First we were treated to a topless Putin showing off his six-pack fishing. Then came stories of shooting tigers with tranquiliser darts.
And last year, on his 56th birthday, having moved from being President to Prime Minister of Russia, he released Let’s Learn Judo, a 90 minute DVD in which he is seen effortlessly defeating a Japanese Olympic gold medallist.
Just how pumped up do we want our leaders to be?
samantha is an expert research and theatre consultant. she is currently writing for http://www.show-and-stay.co.ukshow and stay and is very excited about the upcoming west end revival of http://www.show-and-stay.co.uk/oliver.htmloliver!
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