Tanya Gold
If Blairism were a carvery: the Impeccable Pig reviewed
Labour is 30 points ahead, and in honour of this I review the Impeccable Pig in Sedgefield (Cedd’s field), a medieval market town and pit village south of Durham. It is Tony Blair’s former constituency and Camelot, but nothing lasts for ever.
Blairism had pleasingly flimsy beginnings. Sedgefield had yet to choose a Labour parliamentary candidate when a young lawyer sat in a borrowed car outside the house of John Burton, head of the Trimdon Labour Club, on 11 May 1983, thinking he should drive back to London. But he got out and told Burton and his friends that if they selected him, they wouldn’t have to pretend they hated Trident to Labour voters who also liked Trident and didn’t understand why they had to be ashamed of it, as if it were an untidy flowerbed or a single mother. So they took him, and Sedgefield was famous for a while.
People who know the north only as a slur or theoretical concept will think they are in Amersham Old Town or Kew. There are ancient brick houses, pubs and restaurants, a beauty parlour called Be Pampered, and adverts for jumble sales tacked on to posts. People come from Durham for Sunday lunch, and some visit the Impeccable Pig, a long, low, pale-pink inn with two Tesla charging points. Its rival is the Pickled Parson, whose name is based on the local legend that a parson died before his tithes were collected, and his widow pickled him until they were in. I don’t know if the Pickled Parson has Tesla charging points.
I do not know if Tony Blair has manifested at the Impeccable Pig, which opened in 2019, though his enemies will be certain of it: pig to pig, boom. (Why is the word pig a slur? I love pigs, dead or alive.) He does visit Sedgefield but his local – he lived in Trimdon Colliery, in a sinister red-brick house – was the Dun Cow Inn, where he brought George W. Bush in 2003. Bush is never understated. He arrived in a Sikorsky Black Stallion helicopter, waved at his assembled enemies behind their police cordon, and ate fish and chips.
The Impeccable Pig is very Blairite: I am not just typing that for the copy. It is designed for affluent leftists who think they lost power when they kicked out the kind of trade unionist who called Elizabeth II ‘the gaffer’. (And also, for affluent Tories – this seat went blue in 2019.) It has pale walls, pale woods and exposed bricks. There are paintings of pigs in top hats like illustrations from a sequel to Animal Farm: presenting the Boss Class. There are clocks, chandeliers and swags of wisteria, which are possibly plastic. There is a mantelpiece hung halfway up a wall, and that is glut.
The rest of the artwork looks like it was selected by Peter Hitchens. There is a photograph of Winston Churchill in a small hat sucking on a cigar; a photograph of Elizabeth II above the famous quotation ‘My whole life, whether it be long of short, shall be devoted…’; a cover of an arrangement of ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ (price 6d).
The food – beef, pork, chicken, lamb or market fish with vegetables – is perfectly cooked. It’s hard to make a dead pig beautiful but the prayer is on the sign, and they utter it. My only complaint – and it is barely a complaint – is that it is delicate for a Sunday lunch: if you want something doughtier go to the Dun Cow Inn and its memories of Bush and chips.
The myth, as J.R.R. Tolkien told C.S. Lewis – acronym to acronym – is true. If Blairism were a carvery, it would be this one, and it creates in me an unspeakable joy.
