Politicians get in touch with their pasties

Not so long ago politicians were content to demonstrate their credentials as a likeable everyman by kissing babies and shaking voters' hands.

Yesterday, senior figures from Britain's main parties battled to express their ordinariness by appropriating one of the more ubiquitous symbols of modern life: the shop-bought pasty.

In what was dubbed an outbreak of "pseudo-plebbing", the Prime Minister led a fightback against damaging allegations by the chief executive of bakers Greggs, Ken McMeikan, that the Government's 20 per cent VAT levy on his products signalled it was out of touch with normal folk.

The Eton-educated Prime Minister styled himself as one of the everyday pastry-gobbling classes by saying he had most recently eaten a West Cornwall Pasty Company snack at Leeds railway station. "I am a pasty-eater myself. I go to Cornwall on holiday, I love a hot pasty," he told reporters.

Cameron was attempting to make up for Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne's earlier admission that he could not remember the last time he had visited a Greggs bakery.

In Redditch, Labour leader Ed Miliband and his shadow Chancellor, Ed Balls, popped into a branch of the local Greggs to exploit the Government's discomfort over the issue. The pair spent £4.70 on eight sausage rolls, highlighting the confusion over when a hot pasty was indeed hot - and thus eligible for VAT under the Chancellor's aim to unify tax on cooked food. "Not just fuel duty going up, child benefit taken away, tax credits being cut, now even putting 20 per cent on the cost of pasties ... And the Chancellor's excuse? He says you can buy them cold and you can avoid the tax," complained Miliband.

Yet if Cameron was hoping he had taken some of the heat out of the debate, he was mistaken. As reporters descended on Leeds station to check the facts, it emerged the last West Cornwall Pasty Company outlet on the concourse had closed five years ago - which means either it served Cameron a very memorable pie or he mis-remembered. A later "clarification" from a Downing St spokesman conceded the location and manufacturer of the mysterious last pasty supper was unknown.

But there were also questions over Balls' passion for the pasty. Recently spotted training in "very tight, unedifying trousers", he has less than a month before he is due to run the London Marathon.

- Independent