Strange article for a Tory MP?

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God save the punks. We mean it, Mary AnnMichael Gove I may be a Conservative MP but I hope that doesn’t make me an Antichrist. Thanks to the party whips I am certainly prevented from being an anarchist. But I still long to be anarchic. And I’m grateful to my fellow times2 columnist Mary Ann Seighart for reminding me why. Last week Mary Ann explained why she could never have been a punk. She did so with a gusto that was, in the best sense of the word, vicious. She spat on the memory of Malcolm McLaren. She pogoed on the grave of the Sex Pistols. And I loved it. But the righteous anger she displayed, denouncing McLaren for his cynicism in ripping off young record-buyers, ripping into the Pistols for their lack of musicianship, only reminded me what it was that I liked about punk. People arriving at a cosy party, in Mary Ann’s case the 30th birthday celebrations for punk itself, and raising merry hell. Mary Ann explained that she was the right age for punk as a teenager in 1976. I, despite what the byline photo may suggest, was too young to be swept up in the first phase of the movement. They didn’t let us pierce any part of our body at Sunnybank Primary School. But the truth about punk is that its appeal, or lack

of it, isn’t about age. It’s about attitude. And our reactions to punk define the essential difference between the Sieghart world view and the Gove temperament. A difference which is much more than a matter of the (relatively small) gap in our ages, and a divergence which is, in its way, as sharp as that between Left and Right, warrior and healer, Roundhead and Cavalier, or fire and water. Do you go gooey at the thought of Imagining All the People Living for Today? Or does your pulse quicken when you hear that War is Declared and Battle Come Down? Are you a Lennonist or do you secretly cheer that phoney Beatle mania has bitten the dust? Mary Ann, notwithstanding her kind words about the Clash’s musicianship, is a self-confessed fan of the Sixties, a romantic with a soft spot for hippies. And in her case the soft spot is usually the rain-soaked fields of Glastonbury, site of many happy Sieghart memories. I, on the other hand, regard hippydom, like pony clubs, as

an English middle-class leisure option that kids like me could never have afforded to indulge in. Instead, we thrilled to the idea of punk. We wanted an authentic sound of the suburbs, and we found it in music whose rawness was a deliberate provocation. But the division between the natural hippy and the instinctive punk isn’t just a matter of musical taste or even class-consciousness. It colours your attitude to politics. Was your first response to the political challenges of the early Eighties the hope that we could once again Teach the World to Sing in Perfect Harmony? In other words, were you inclined, like Mary Ann, to believe in the noble dream that was the SDP? Or were you, like me, inclined to think that after 40 years of social democratic drift it was time to Rip it Up and Start Again. To update the debate, do you prefer Blair Mark One, the builder of the Big Tent, the soft-rock leader of the first term? Or do you prefer Blair Mark Two, the punk premier who’s

happy to break up the party to get what he wants? I suspect Mary Ann’s preference is for the former, while mine is for the latter. And, as with the Sex Pistols, I may not agree with a word that’s said but I have to admire the style. Because the hippy-punk divide is attitudinal rather than ideological it influences your response to much more than music or politics. Do you prefer Colin Firth or Gary Oldman, Richard Curtis or Mike Leigh, Steven Spielberg or Spike Lee? In each case, as the punk-inclined among you won’t need telling, we go for option two. And while our aesthetic is raw, we prefer our breakfasts cooked. Our tea is unperfumed, as are our candles. And just in case you think my division seems suspiciously close to a gender-specific thing, consider which Times columnists seem closer to hippydom (not just Mary Ann, I would submit, but also Libby Purves, Magnus Linklater and Ben Macintyre) and which are natural punks (not just me, I would argue, but also Matthew

Parris, Alice Miles and Janice Turner). I may be stunningly wrong in my analysis, but at least I know I’ve started a fight where none existed before. And in that respect, if no other, I’ve been true to punk . . . Love it. Hate it. But not in plastic bottle I suppose there’s one other divide in British society as profound as that between hippies and punks. The split between those who hate Marmite. And those who love it. In this dispute I’m on the pro-Marmite side. I accept that it’s an acquired taste. But, having worked hard to acquire it, I’m worried about plans to dilute it. As you may have already read, Marmite is proposing to market its sublime product in a plastic squeezy bottle ostensibly to aid spreading and keep the nectar free of butter. The plastic bottle is also supposed to eliminate the need to scrape the last of your Marmite out of the recesses of the jar. On one level, I’m genuinely grateful for Marmite’s

thoughtfulness. Since the age of 18, I have spent many long hours trying to extract Marmite from the most distant corners of the jar, working with all the desperation, but none of the skill, of a miner digging out a final seam of coal from a soon-to-be exhausted pit. For as long as I’ve been eating Marmite, and even before I actually learnt to enjoy it, I was keenly scraping the stuff out. That’s mainly because Marmite became one of my staple foodstuffs during my university years. I hadn’t really come across it before. Scots don’t really go for any spread that doesn’t have a reassuringly high sugar and pectin content. But I developed an appetite for the stuff as a student. Principally because, by the end of term, I couldn’t afford to eat anything else. Now I am concerned that the new plastic dispenser will alter the delicate savour of the spread. Because one of the iron rules of gastronomy is that products taken out of glass and dispensed from other containers

invariably taste worse. Ketchup is worse in plastic, as is mayo. And both wine and milk suffer when they’re in cardboard rather than glass. Perhaps we can have a campaign to preserve the traditional bottle. With a suitable anthem to rally us, such as I Love the Sound of Scraping Glass. The writer is Conservative MP for Surrey HeathPeter H

 

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