The headline smacked me between the eyes. ‘I can’t afford to turn my Aga on this winter,’ a nice writer called Flora Watkins whinged in the Telegraph last weekend (she once wrote a Spectator piece about the sublime awfulness of cockapoos that I wished I’d written myself).
The sub-head continued: ‘Our writer’s once cosy Norfolk home is feeling the chill as energy bills rise – how will she and her family cope?’ There was a fetching picture of our tragic protagonist in cardi and layers clutching a mug in front of her Aga and an impressive batterie de cuisine. Watkins had also swathed her pretty neck in the Diana-sheep-jersey scarf (white sheep on red, and one dear little black sheep).
‘I can’t afford to turn my Aga on this winter,’ the feature started, as per the headline. ‘I know, I know. In the annals of first world problems, not being able to turn the Aga on sounds like it’s up there with having to ski in Bulgaria instead of Verbs or slumming it in the stalls rather than the circle at Glyndebourne. And yes, I admit that it’s a niche problem – unless, like me, you live in a part of the country where winter doesn’t relinquish its grip for an extra month and the wind coming off the North Sea bends any tulips peeking through to an angle of 90 degrees. “Nothing between us and the Urals”, as they’re fond of saying around here…’
It was no good. I could have warned her. Even though Watkins admitted right at the top that she wasn’t expecting any sympathy, this feature was a thirst trap for absolutely anyone on X with a throbbing, lefty chip on their shoulder (i.e. everyone).
Someone called Manic Kieth (sic) Preachers called it ‘Peak Telegraph’ and someone else had dutifully retweeted ‘Kieth’ and added: ‘What a load of rollocks. Flora Watkins is a journalist freelancing for a number of posh rags like Horse & Hound, Telegraph and others. Yet she proclaims she cannot fire up her Aga. Get in the real world, there are genuine poor people out there struggling, you are not one.’
It’s fascinating just how fast people get wound up about Agas. When we (that’s the royal we – I should say ‘when my husband’) bought the family house in Notting Hill in 1992, there was a printing press in the dank basement and no kitchen at all. My sole contribution to the household was a two-oven cream Aga.
Then, when we jointly bought a farmhouse in Somerset off my father in 2000, it had not been improved since the Middle Ages – apart from a 100-year-old Aga, which was supposed to do all the cooking and all the hot water but did neither and would sputter out, generally on Christmas Day just after I’d put the turkey in. We replaced it with an equally temperamental reconditioned one which means that when I want to annoy people like ‘Kieth’ I say I actually have two Agas, just not in the same house.
It is particularly annoying I know to have an Aga in Notting Hill as it’s so rus-in-urbe smug to have a country kitchen in town
It is particularly annoying I know to have an Aga in Notting Hill as it’s so rus-in-urbe smug to have a country kitchen in town. It’s the rural middle-class signifier, up there with an ancient Series 2 Land Rover Defender. But I didn’t know quite how cross it made people until I was standing to be a Euro MP for a mayfly party called Change UK in 2019.
For some reason I was asked to make a speech at one of the party’s launches, in Bath, at a cricket ground. Out of some devilment or boredom I made the quip about having two Agas – ha ha, but not in the same house – in front of an invited audience that included Fleet Street’s sketchwriters, i.e. Quentin Letts, then of the Times, and John Crace of the Guardian. I thought they were metropolitan and knowing enough to detect that I was making a joke against myself, and they were… but it turned out the man from the communist rag, the Morning Star ‘incorporating the Daily Worker’, was not quite so sophisticated. A front-page splash followed headlined: ‘“Two-Agas” Johnson to stand for Change UK’.
The story took my revelation of having two of the Swedish ovens as incontrovertible evidence that Change UK, comprising Remain ultras campaigning for a second referendum, must be a Trojan horse of some sort for something. It was old politics rather than new politics, my presence alone proved the whole thing was a sham as I was an Establishment shill, and so on. And who am I, now, to say they were wrong?
Anyway, undeterred by this hit-job, a couple of years later, I agreed (‘when in hole, keep digging’ has always been my motto) to do a piece for the Telegraph, a paper that seems obsessed with Agas, about whether my house had ‘Tory energy’. This was apropos this list that was going viral on TikTok (N.B. It is not my list):
- An Aga
- A wine cooler
- A boiling water tap
- A pool table
- Le Creuset homeware
- Multiple sinks in the same bathroom
- A dining room with a hatch
- Spiral staircase
- A gated entrance
- A Thermomix
- Two ovens, because one just isn’t enough
- A TV in the bathroom
- Double fridge with an ice and water dispenser
- Fireplaces in the majority of rooms
- Chandeliers
- Cinema room
- Home gym
- Fridge stocked with Waitrose products
- Landscaped garden
- A Range Rover
- Sonos speakers
- Wellies for every member of the family
- French windows
- A kitchen island
- Bugatti cutlery
Did you see what topped the list? You did. An Aga. And this of course explains everything about the reaction to poor, shivering Flora Watkins’s piece. It was her admission that 1. she lived in the country, 2. in a rambling house and 3. was called Flora and at one point, could afford to install an Aga. That was all that the lefty sneery progressives needed to know to convict her.
No matter that Watkins, in the piece, also admitted: ‘An Aga was top of my wish list when we moved out of London. Growing up, my mum and her friends were all reading Joanna Trollope’s “Aga sagas”. Agas were aspirational; I associated them with pretty period houses, welcoming places that smelled of polished beeswax and bowls of quinces. Home for me was a red-brick 1970s box with a built-in electric oven where my parents fought all the time – I wanted something with a lot more soul.’
This is not about energy prices at all, but ‘Tory energy’, isn’t it? And the damnation of aspiration. For this I commend Flora for her confessional bravery. Not many these days would admit to having an Aga, let alone boast about having two.
A version of this article first appeared on Rachel Johnson’s Substack, The Rachel Johnson Papers.
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