Worst Take of the Week: Jamie Oliver's Tory Superheroes vs a Tory Superhero

Welcome to Angus Take House – a weekly column in which I pit two of the wildest takes the world's great thinkers have rustled up against each other. This is your one-stop shop for the meatiest verdicts and saltiest angles on the world's happenings. Go and grab a napkin – these juicy hot takes are fresh from the griddle.

TAKE #1:

What’s the story? Childhood obesity.
Reasonable take: Apparently taxes on sugar genuinely deter unhealthy habits, but is that fair if policies affect households with the smallest budgets the most?
Turkey Twizzler: Hey kids, banning burgers is a bit like having a super-power!

Jamie Oliver's myriad attempts to save the children have varied in success. There was the time he chopped up a load of chicken spines in order to show American children how nuggets were made, a demonstration that did nothing to dent their desire to devour them on the spot. Then there was the time he tried to set up a special "Dream School" in the UK, an experiment which resulted in David Starkey telling an overweight teenager he could "barely move" he was so fat. It seems whatever tactics the Pukka Preacherman uses, he just can’t get through!

Well, he might have finally done it this time. Clearly seizing on the superhero fever that’s in the air – somebody’s taken the kids to see the new Avengers, Mr Oliver! – Jamie posted a (now deleted) Twitter thread featuring a series of illustrations… characterising Tory MPs as superheroes.

There was Theresa May, AKA "The Boss", who Jamie implored to be "the hero of kids’ health". "Go go go" he told Michael Gove, designed to look like Iron Man if he was played by Ted Danson, asking him to force companies to be more honest on packaging. "Hit the ground running," he encouraged the minister for local government James Brokenshire (ironically drawn with chicken nuggets for hands), suggesting he give local authorities the power to protect kids from junk food advertising. Jeremy Hunt and Damian Hinds also got the Marvel treatment, in a pair of images that look alarmingly like "tactful" erectile dysfunction leaflets you’d find in a GP surgery. "Get back to being Super YOU."

Bizarre and cloying illustrations aside, I think the saddest part of this whole affair is that the Naked Chef deleted them as soon as the backlash hit. Clearly sensing that "Theresa May As Wonder Woman" was a pretty drastic misreading of the room, he banished the entire project to the realm of screen-grabs within the space of a few hours. Another one for his little "Whoopsy Daisy" book, alongside his ill-fated chain of "Union Jack" restaurants, his cooking school Recipease, his boujie barbecue restaurant chain Barbecoa and the names of all of his children.

TAKE #2:

What’s the story? The Eurovision song contest this weekend!
Reasonable Take: Wahey! Douze pints please, barkeep! Ere we go!
Nil Point: Brexit means fucking Brexit how many times do I need to tell you.

Quick photo of Michael Fabricant? Yeah? Yeah go on. Just to get us in the mood, just to set the tone. Okay, let’s do it:

There he is. Right, so Michael Fabricant is an anti-EU Tory MP – who moonlights hosting beauty pageants in Southern Texas by the looks of things – who has seen the progress made with negotiations so far and decided that Brexit can go further. Spirits, he has decided, can be crushed into a finer powder than this. We can Brexit harder than we already are. Let’s, he reckons, fuck off the Eurovision Song Contest. He said as much in the House of Commons this week, a suggestion that was, thankfully, written off by everyone who heard it.

The Eurovision Song Contest is, in its own way, a very important event. Yes, it’s pretty much exactly the same every year – a few bucolic jigs, some eye-wateringly sincere emo-EDM sung by a woman with a cape the size of a football pitch, a bloke speak-singing in thunderous Teutonic tones over some trancey-techno, Graham Norton saying stuff like "oh, don’t drop it!" to dancers carrying some bizarre props, a token heavy metal entry, a UK entry you somehow forget while listening to it, lots of people waving flags and blowing kisses into cameras from some futurist sofas backstage, and a fairly tasteful Latvian entry that wins – but that doesn’t make it any less essential!

Just because Fabricant – the most successful double-glazing salesman in the South-East, "the cheapest Boris Johnson the agency had on their books" – doesn’t appreciate its pleasures, doesn’t mean we should have to suffer. If a Hard Brexit means pulling out of the Eurovision Song Contest, a competition that includes Israel in its definition of Europe, then call me a Remoaner! I mean, don’t, but you get what I mean.

Of course, maybe Fabricant has seen how badly we always lose and is simply trying to save us from humiliation on the European stage. Except: oh yeah.

PRIME CUT: Fabricant wins this week, for his Eurovision slander. Ironic, really, for a man whose aesthetic can be accurately described as "The 3rd Place Dutch Entry, 1978".

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