With Michael Gove

Table Talk

In this special Christmas episode of Table Talk, Michael Gove joins Laura Prendergast to reflect on his life through the lens of food and drin

Key takeaways

• Gove recalls a childhood in Aberdeen defined by 'brain food' like fish soup and mince and tatties provided by his father's work as a fish merchant.
• His time at Oxford University was marked by frequenting pubs such as The White Horse on Broad Street and the Rose Crown in North Oxford.
• His entry into journalism involved a memorable introduction to Fleet Street involving mixed grills and Rioja with journalists like Robert Hardman and Quentin Letts.
• As Education Secretary, he noted that students often bypassed healthy school lunch initiatives through 'sausage roll pizza frenzy' during breaks.
• He describes the 'Notting Hill set' of politicians, including David Cameron and George Osborne, as a group where social and professional lives overlapped over dinner.

Main topics

• Childhood food memories in Aberdeen
• Oxford University pub culture
• Fleet Street journalism era

Notable quotes

I was in a state of learned dependency.

Conclusion

The episode provides a nostalgic and insightful look at how food shape

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:00) Subscribe to The Spectator and get 12 weeks of Britain's most incisive politics coverage, unrivaled books and arts reviews, and so much more, all for just £12. Not only that, but we'll also send you a £20 Amazon gift card, absolutely free. Go to www.spectator.com forward slash voucher to claim this offer now. Speaker 1 (0:27) Hello and welcome to Table Talk, the Spectator's food and drink podcast. I'm Laura Prendergast and for this special Christmas episode, I'm delighted to be joined by a guest who needs no introduction, the Spectator's editor, Michael Gove. Speaker 2 (0:41) Hi Laura, it's a pleasure to join you. Speaker 1 (0:43) We always start at the beginning, Michael, as our listeners will know, and ask, what are your earliest memories of food? Speaker 2 (0:49) My earliest memories of food, I think, are inevitably tied up with my dad's work and also with the family setting that we had. My dad was a fish merchant, so there was a ready supply from where he worked. So whether or not it was fish soup, breaded fish, battered fish, fish cakes. There's a ready supply of brain food, as it were, from my dad. My mum would also cook lunch every day for me and my grandfather. So I would, both at primary school and in my first year at secondary school, would come back at lunchtime in order to be fed by my mum alongside my grandfather. And the particular staple. was mince and tatties and mealy pudding. So for those who require translation, that's minced beef cooked with onion, mashed potatoes, and then mealy pudding or white pudding, oatmeal pudding, is a sort of savoury suet. I know that that sounds artery-clogging, and it was, but growing up in Aberdeen, those are the inescapable memories I have. alongside visiting the corner shop, which had what you now only, I think, encounter in sort of holiday destinations, which were sweets stored in jars. And you could point at each of the individual jars and have two or three sewer plumes or rhubarb and custard boiled sweets, have them all together in a little brown bag. And those were my treats. Speaker 1 (2:28) Do you have any particular favourite dishes of your mother's? Speaker 2 (2:31) Well, as I say, mince and tatties is the one with which I associate my childhood most. But I also remember that my mother would always cook a roast lunch, roast dinner on a Sunday. And whether it was chicken or beef, chicken more usually rather than beef, there are particular associations in my mind with... Myself, my mum and dad and my sister around the table at home. And inevitably also Christmas. And I remember, again, my grandparents. I lost my grandmother when I was, my maternal grandmother when I was very young. But I remember my paternal grandmother and then my paternal grandfather being regular guests. And again, it was traditional in... Every sense. Traditional both in the sense that it was turkey and trimmings and traditional in that there were the rows that you would expect when you had three generations of, how can I put it, pugnacious and stubborn males. Me, my father and my grandfather. Speaker 1 (3:43) And did you learn to cook at all during this stage of your life? Speaker 2 (3:47) I was in a state of learned dependency. Speaker 2 (3:53) relied to a significant extent on Speaker 1 (3:56) home cooking Speaker 2 (3:57) and then later on at school dinners or pet lunches. It was only really when I went to university that I had to cook for myself. And there, it was a mixture of remembered recipes, occasional desperate phone calls to my mother, and then a greater level of experimentation. Speaker 2 (4:22) I think that anyone who suffered or endured my cooking when I was an undergraduate will remember one particularly disastrous tuna casserole, which for some reason included bran flakes. I'm not entirely sure. where that recipe come from. It was not an innovation of my part. I was following, I think, something probably cut out from a newspaper in a recipes for one supplement designed to allow students to make sure that their then grant, I'm that old, was able to go that little bit further. Speaker 1 (4:54) And did alcohol feature during your time at Oxford? Speaker 2 (4:57) Alcohol featured very strongly during my time at Oxford. I found that one of the... Nice things. I think it's still true about Oxford as a city is the range and the attractiveness of its pubs. So I was very fond of a pub called The White Horse, which is on Broad Street. It's just next to Trinity and just next to Blackwell's. And so it gives the impression by its proximity to Oxford's most famous bookshop of being a scholar's pub. But it wasn't really. It was just a convenient destination for friends of mine, whether they were hot-footing it back from the history faculty or wanted to know somewhere which was attractive and proximate to most of the central colleges to convene. But there was also a pub in North Oxford. I was at a North Oxford college called Lady Margaret Hall, called the Rosen Crown, which was more of a mix between town and gown. I remember it particularly because I was so derelict in handing in my essays during my second year and such a dissolute and terrible student that I had to apologize to my then tutor, still alive, a great man called Nicholas Shrimpton, and I and my tutorial partner, a great man called Chris Ferguson, who's now a college bursar, were so abjectly sorry. for how terrible we'd been as students, that we apologised to Nick by taking him out to lunch and, appropriately enough, it was in the pub where we'd spent most of our time when we should have been in the library. Speaker 1 (6:38) After Oxford, you then move into a career in journalism. What are your memories of that period in terms of what you were eating and drinking? Speaker 2 (6:46) The very first time that I was... The very first day that I was paid. for journalism was when I was working as a diary casual on the Peterborough diary column of the Daily Telegraph. The diary casual scheme at that time was a bit like the old dock labour scheme in that you would ring in or ask if there was any space in the diary team. This was when people were starting out in journalism and there were no such things as contracts and traineeships were rare. But if you were sufficiently either determined or stubborn and, you know, incapable of taking no for an answer, you would eventually find a shift. On my very first day, I went to a pub in Limehouse,