Pan Handler

‘REVENGE is a dish best served cold.

The culprit is believed to have adopted a particularly horrible disguise

And if you’re trainee chef Edwina Currie, it’s best prepared in a selection of copper pots and pans of the type favoured by celebrity cook Gordon Ramsay.

And that’s lucky since as a memento of her time in TV’s Hell’s Kitchen, the Sun hears the former Tory minister admit to walking off with a selection of kitchen goods.

‘Al and I had a quick natter,’ says Edwina, taking care to implicate fellow wannabe cook Al Murray in her plan, ‘and said, ‘If you were taking one thing out of Hell’s Kitchen what would you take?’

‘I said, ‘Well, I’ll take some copper pans’ and that’s what I arrived home with.’

And that makes Currie a villain – which is no surprise to those of us who read in the Mail that, of all the social groups, the middle classes (of which Currie is undeniably a member) are the most prone to lawbreaking.

‘Britain is in the grip of a £14bn crimewave,’ thunders the Mail. ‘But it’s not murderers, rapists, muggers and burglars we have to fear.’

It isn’t? Then who is it? Gypsies? Black men in cars? Foreigners? Magpies?

No, dear reader, the scourge of the decent are those dastardly middle classes, people like the light-fingered Currie.

Researchers for TV Licensing questioned 2,000 people divided evenly across the social classes as to what so-called petty crimes they had engaged in.

The list of misdemeanours for consideration was: not paying road tax, not buying a TV licence, damaging goods and retuning them to a shop for a refund, wrongly parking in a disabled bay, fare-dodging, paying cash-in-hand to avoid tax and pocketing cash when given too much change by a shop worker.

And so to the results… But, hold on! The Mail says the survey was ‘fatally flawed’. Which means it spends nearly as much time trying to undermine the revelations about those nefarious middle classes (i.e. Mail readers) as it does on the main story.

The Mirror, though, has no such qualms, and says that the worst offenders are professional people, of whom 64% admitted to breaking one thing from the list, compared to 43% from lower incomes.

And the evidence is everywhere, with the paper reminding us of Cherie Blair’s fare dodging (a crime for which she was fined £10), David Beckham’s failure to renew his tax disc and now Edwina Currie’s pan caper.

The middle classes have been caught bang to rights. The authorities have been alerted and Currie and her cronies had best flee while the going’s good.

Hanging really is too good for them…’

Posted: 8th, June 2004 | In: Tabloids Comment | TrackBack | Permalink