UK's new PM Keir Starmer is the 1st Jewish pescatarian to ascend the position

'Spitting Image', a British TV show that satirised politicians as hideous puppets, once showed former prime minister Margaret Thatcher and her servile Cabinet members in a restaurant. Thatcher orders beef: “Raw please.” “And what about the vegetables?” asks the waitress. “They’ll have the same as me,” Thatcher replies.

In his resignation speech, Rishi Sunak lauded a Britain broad-minded enough to accept a Hindu PM whose family put Diwali lights in Downing Street. He might also have mentioned his avoidance of beef.

Eating beef used to be an essential part of British identity, memorialised in the mythical character John Bull, always shown with a haunch of beef. In Ben Rogers’s history Beef And Liberty, he notes how butchers lead many political riots, fearsomely brandishing their knives.

The French sneeringly called the British ‘les rosbifs’ (roast beefs). A song titled ‘The Roast Beef of Old England’ was often played at official events, with politically-charged lyrics like: “When mighty Roast Beef was the Englishman’s food/ It ennobled our veins and enriched our blood.” Beef Wellington, a steak baked inside puff pastry, was probably named for the Duke of Wellington.

Rishi Sunak twice PM in the early 19th century. Thatcher, in real life, would serve a strange sounding starter of beef consommé blended with cream cheese and curry powder.

But for a British PM to spurn all that beefy history was quite an achievement, though Sunak enthusiastically mentioned other meat, like his family’s love of bacon for breakfast.

With Keir Starmer, the UK has elected a PM who won’t eat that either. He and his wife were vegetarian for years, and even raised their kids that way till they were 10, when they were given the choice to try meat. His son opted for meat, but his daughter stayed vegetarian, along with her mother.

Starmer himself now eats fish. On a podcast, he said his ideal last meal would be the tandoori salmon he ate at a Glasgow restaurant along with daal, naan and pulao.

He clearly likes tandoori flavouring since he Keir Starmer mentioned making quorn, a mycoprotein based meat substitute, tandoori-style at home. And fish crops up again in the tuna sandwiches he survives on while at work. Starmer’s pescatarian politics might be less unusual than it seems. Despite the symbolism of British beef, an island nation obviously has deep links with fish.

There’s the working-class favourite of fish and chips, which politicians ostentatiously eat in public. In the final stages of his campaign, Sunak bought fish and chips for his team and the media in the seaside town of Redcar (the constituency still voted Labour). During World War II, when most meat was rationed, Winston Churchill insisted that fish and chips remain freely available for all.

In 1782, Sir Robert Preston, an MP who had become rich with the East India Company, invited a rising young politician named William Pitt to his cottage on the Thames. They talked politics and feasted on whitebait, tiny juvenile fish caught in huge numbers in the estuary, lightly cooked and consumed whole.

The next year, Pitt became PM, and remembered the meal and the value of talking politics away from the intensity of Parliament. He started a tradition, which lasted decades, of MPs travelling downriver to feast on whitebait at the end of parliamentary sessions. This became a public attraction in itself — at a time when few people could witness Parliament in action, everyone could now see and even dine alongside MPs, a uniquely democratic experience.


More recently, and less happily, fish has been deeply involved in the UK’s decision to leave the European Union. Fishermen were strong supporters of Brexit, hoping to escape the perceived tyranny of EU fishing quotas. Yet, in reality, Brexit complicated exports to Europe, which eats far more fish than Britain, and constrained the labour supply needed to process it. Just one more problem that the UK’s pescatarian PM must now face.