Friday, March 06, 2009

"And a portion of your very excellent guacamole, please"

Those were the immortal words which were memorably not spoken by Peter Mandelson during a campaign visit to a Hartlepool fish and chip shop shortly after his adoption as the Labour candidate there in the mid-1990s. But, of course, they ought to have been. Indeed, never did an apocryphal political tale more deserve to be true than in this case.

So was it really green custard which the airport protesters threw at him today, or was it the guacomole coming back to haunt him again? Or could it, just simply, have been a punnet of mushy peas?

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3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Apparently the story was born when a US-born researcher mistook mushy peas for guacamole in a Merseyside fish and chip shop during the Knowsley North by-election in 1986.

Paul Linford said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Paul Linford said...

Indeed, that does seem to be the general consensus. There still seems to be some debate however as to whether Mandelson (who was then Labour's director of communications) might actually have been present when the incident occurred, even though it wasn't him who uttered the words.