Full English Breakfast Politics

I am in London for the week and, as the saying goes, “When in Rome,” so I have been starting every day right with a full English breakfast.

This morning, I sat down in the Mad Bishop & Bear beside Paddington Station, tucked in among retail glow and commuter fatigue, and, for the third day, I ordered the full English like a man making a small stand for civilisation.

And I mean, this was the full English.

Not the Instagram version. Not the vegan re-enactment. The real plate. Bacon, eggs (poached, as God intended), sausage, black pudding, hash brown, beans, mushrooms, and two buttered pieces of toast that looked like they’d been drafted into service without being told what the mission was.

The pub was doing what London does best in the mornings. It was pretending everything was fine while the whole city moved like a machine that couldn’t decide whether it was proud of itself or embarrassed. Suits with dead eyes. Tourists with hopeful eyes. Workers with tired eyes. A thousand little journeys passing each other without anyone noticing, like ants moving through tunnels in one of those plastic ant colonies that's been put on the shelf but no one looks at anymore.

The full English arrived, and a smile broke out across my face. You see, I'm a protein-first eater, so the plate really spoke to me. I eat like an Australian who grew up believing breakfast should hold you upright through any weather and any nonsense. I devoured the bacon and eggs, sausage, and black pudding. I treated the toast and hash brown suspiciously. I respect carbohydrates, but I do not fully trust them. As my portly physique attests, we have a complicated history.

Speaking of complications, in 2026, the full English is no longer a meal. It’s a stress test for modern government. Every item is a supply chain. Every item is an energy bill. Somewhere, someone had filed paperwork about it. Perhaps a compliance officer, somewhere, had been nodding over the items on my breakfast plate like they were a wind farm application. And all of that has meant added cost.

Back in early November last year, a Tory MP even stood up in the Commons warning the full English was “at risk” on high street because the core ingredients were all rising and the country wouldn’t forgive politicians if the staple disappeared. Sitting there at Paddington, I could see why he was complaining. At £17.50 for the plate alone, about $35 Australian, it's not really “breakfast” but more a tourist indulgence, priced as if it comes with a small shareholding in the piggery and hatchery that brought it into being.

The whole thing got me thinking about how the full English is a metaphor for what's working and what's not working in modern politics.

Bacon first. Pork is not magic. It is feed, farming, fuel, refrigeration, transport, labour. It is biosecurity rules, animal welfare rules, emissions rules, packaging rules, advertising rules. Somewhere an inspector has measured the “emissions” of a pig using a chart last updated by someone who thinks bacon comes from a supermarket. Bacon is supermarkets squeezing producers and producers squeezing staff and staff squeezing themselves. When you bite into bacon, you are now eating the downstream effect of a thousand polite bureaucratic frameworks.

The eggs sat there, pristine and trembling, and I thought about inflation. A dozen eggs in Sydney or Melbourne can now set you back about $8.50. In London, you’re looking at roughly £4.50 a dozen, which is about $9 Australian. For something that drops out of a chook, reliably, with the enthusiasm of a metronome. For that price, the hen should at least sign the carton and promise a weekly podcast.

That’s when you realise that cost of living isn’t an abstract. It’s the basics getting promoted into the luxury bracket. Feed costs, energy costs, transport costs, rent, regulation, and middlemen. The simple things don’t stay simple. They just get more expensive while everyone in charge talks like this is weather.

The sausage tasted like compromise. It held together, mostly. It did the job. It was satisfying in the way the Coalition is satisfying when it remembers what it is supposed to stand for. Sausages are not supposed to be complicated. They are supposed to be reliable. The moment you start tinkering with it to impress people who do not even like sausage, you ruin it for the people who actually eat it. It becomes expensive, bland, and oddly smug about it.

Black pudding, though, was the real political item on the plate. Dark. Dense. Unapologetic. The sort of thing polite society pretends not to notice until it’s right there, steaming, and refusing to be shamed. It’s the Pauline Hansons, the Nigel Farages, the Alex Antics of the world. An acquired taste. Not for everyone. But once you’ve had enough of the bland, filler sausage of official politics, you start to appreciate the thing that actually tastes like something. People can sneer all they like. At least it isn’t pretending to be tofu.

The beans arrived like the welfare state. Sweet, soft, always there. Meant to help, meant to fill gaps, meant to keep things from collapsing. Beans are the modern welfare state: cheap, sticky, and somehow on the plate whether you asked or not. And like welfare, since it's been offered, you'll take it knowing full well that someone is going to have to pay for this later.

And then there was the tomato, sitting there like it had been invited by a public relations firm to make the plate look healthy. It’s the Greens of the breakfast: mostly there to add colour and virtue signal. Warm on the outside, raw in the middle, and sensible folk will leave it alone and eat the rest of the meal.

Mushrooms were the media class. They thrive in the dark. They multiply fast. They can be delicious if you cook them properly, dangerous if you get the wrong ones, and, all said and done, you would not want them taking over the plate. In a sensible world, mushrooms are a side. In modern politics, the side gets the microphone, and the main course gets lectured.

The hash brown was housing policy. A compressed little brick that used to be cheap and cheerful, and now feels like it's been engineered by a committee. Crispy promises on the outside. Soft reality inside. It’s what happens when a working group is tasked with inventing comfort food.

And the toast. The toast was the taxpayer. Two dependable slices. Quiet. Sometimes ignored. Always expected to show up, expected to hold whatever gets piled on top. Buttered as the small reward the system offers for not making a fuss.

Paddington hummed outside, and I looked at my plate and thought about Australia. We are told our problems are unique. They are not. Britain has the same elite-to-public disconnect, just wrapped in older language and better manners.

The cost of living is not a mystery. It is the accumulation of choices. It is energy decisions dressed up as virtue. It is immigration numbers treated as a corporate KPI while infrastructure falls behind. It is housing policy that protects asset values for people who already own property, while young families are told to be grateful for rentals with mould. It is a political class that speaks in abstracts and manages decline with communications strategies.

A full English should be a fixed point. It is a standard. It is a baseline. It is what you order when you want to know whether the country still remembers how to do solid, normal things without turning them into a crusade.

The Mad Bishop & Bear delivered. The plate was hot. The bacon was proper. The eggs were soft and clean. The sausage did its job. The black pudding stood its ground. The beans behaved. The mushrooms were fine. The toast was toast. Less said about the hash browns and tomato, which I treated as garnish.

That is more than I can say for the institutions currently running the Anglosphere.

I paid the bill, watched commuters funnel past like those ants in the ant colony on the shelf, and had the uneasy feeling that breakfast might be the last place where the system still works without insisting you celebrate it.

I walked out into London with the taste of bacon and black pudding in my mouth and the thought that politics, at its core, is supposed to do what breakfast does: Fuel ordinary people. Keep them steady. Give them strength. Let them get on with life.

If the people in charge cannot manage that, they should not be in charge of anything.

“There is nothing more political than food. The things that we eat are the direct reflection of our histories.”
– Anthony Bourdain,