Turtle Soup?

What do the Lords, ladies and politicians of Parliament eat behind the closed doors and inside the fancy dining rooms of the Palace of Westminster? And how much is it costing the taxpayer. Rich Bunn investigates. 

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With a spin depending on who it was and what their political views were, there was one phrase that everyone who found out I worked at Parliament invariably said at some point. And it wasn't one I would have guessed in a million years. This is Unseen Parliament. Stories from inside the Palace of Westminster. I'm Rich Bunn. The phrase was must be nice eating all those subsidized meals. Or drinking all that subsidized beer, or getting access to all that cheap wine. For the idea that inside the Palace of Westminster is a secret cornucopia of phenomenally cheap eats, where the liquor always flows and the coffee pot is hot, seems to be an incredibly popular and pervasive one. But where does that rumor come from, and how much truth is in it? Well, to answer that question, I'd like to start with the past, because I think it's in the past that a lot of urban myth gets built. And I'm going to begin with the most extreme example of palatial abundance that I could find on record, the coronation banquet of George VI in 1821. This was held in Westminster Hall, which is an enormous grand medieval well, hall. And inside of it, twenty-three makeshift kitchens were built to serve two thousand or so total guests. During the feast were served 160 terrines of soup, 80 of which, by the way, contained turtle, eight venison joints, forty beef joints, fourteen joints of mutton, two hundred and forty lobsters, and one thousand six hundred chickens. And those were washed down with 9,840 bottles of wine, and a hundred gallons of iced punch. In today's money, the entire cost of all that food was about two million pounds. There were also some side accounts saying it wasn't that pleasant, as they had to do things like bring in hundreds of candles, which dripped hot wax and made the room boiling hot. I suppose the point I want to make is that the palace is not unaccustomed to large quantities of fancy food, or particularly to controversy. After all, to hold his grand banquet, George VI not only used a lot of public money, but pretty much all of the French war reparations. Getting back to today, I want to talk a little bit about the Speaker of the House of Commons, who is currently a man named Sir Lindsay Hoyle. For when the Palace of Westminster was rebuilt in the 1800s, it was constructed with a large grace and favour stately home in the middle. That is the home of the Speaker, who keeps order in the House, and also has a, in my mind, quite vaguely defined role to lead UK diplomacy by establishing ties between countries and parliamentarians. A large way in which this is done seems to be in the hosting of dinners and receptions, which of course is done with public money. In 1800, state dinners at Parliament were held weekly, and all of these state dinners are still held in the extremely fancy state dining room. There's always plenty of people having plenty of good times and plenty of alcohol. And the last portrait in that particular room is Horace King, who was speaker in the 1960s and early 70s, and I always thought that was a little ironic, given that he was once very publicly called out in the chamber for being so drunk he couldn't get into his chair at 9.25 in the morning. I have noticed distinction in the quality of catering between what is served to, say, MPs and what is served to the night shift security team. I'm going to come around to cost, but I think it's important to note that when the house is sitting, MPs are retitled to a hot meal, and that is a large part of what costs so much opening a full huge kitchen to cook out-of-hours food for not very many people? As opposed to, say, the security team, who have access to a number of vending machines. Those machines and their endless selection of Twixes and bottles of Yazoo milkshake don't completely rival the rhubarb and vanilla fool and roast venison that's currently available in the Stranger's Dining Room. Anyway, do the staff at Parliament get subsidized food and beer or not? Yes, they do. But also, no. Well, sort of. The meals are run at cost. I think catering staff get a free meal. Everyone else gets a meal that is sort of cheap-ish. It's a bit like school dinners, and it costs six or seven pounds to have a main meal in a pudding. But providing all of those meals costs the taxpayer a lot of money. In fact, it costs about seven million pounds a year to provide catering at Parliament. And there are lots of different reasons why it doesn't make a profit, with the key one being that they're running lots of different outlets at weird and wonderful times, with some pretty antiquated equipment. Alcohol, well yes, alcohol is slightly cheaper if you buy it in a house bar, but again, that's only because the house is not seeking to make a large profit on its beer and wine in the same way that a commercial organization would. And of course, they own the building, so there are no rents, there are no brewery agreements, there are not all the things that a commercial bar in the center of Westminster would have. I will say that the house service has finally caught up to the idea that one, this isn't very popular with the public, and two, they could raise their prices and use that money to offset loss in other areas. Uh so the pints, for example, are round about what you would pay anywhere else. I think they're about six pounds. What I will say is that in 2021, you really could buy a pint in the Stranger's Bar for £3.45, but you can't anymore. Thanks so much for listening through to the end. I'm Rich Bunn, and if you've enjoyed this podcast, please think about subscribing or sharing with a friend. They're published every Tuesday, wherever you get your podcast. Goodbye.