Food: Eating like a Miliband

I came to the Gay Hussar for gags about the Labour party; to find some wreckage of its glory days. Except the Labour party doesn’t have glory days — only tiny breaks in the blue space-time continuum when a) it isn’t eating itself and b) it manages to convince a country of snobs that voting Labour doesn’t mean they aren’t posh or mightn’t, at some vague point in the future, become posh. Now it has spat out a leader who makes David Cameron look normal. ‘Beaker from the Muppets,’ says my boyfriend, when Ed appears on TV. ‘Not the face. The expression.’ And the Gay Hussar is Labour’s canteen. The food, I should remind you, is Hungarian.

So here it is, the same as it has always been — a gaudy red chocolate box, a little battered, as if a deranged grandmother has hurled it across the room and stamped on it. It clings to the end of Greek Street, ready to fall into Soho Square. I walk in, armed with a reservation I do not need. The Gay Hussar is emptier than a TUC conference in Dubai — not so much Gay as Desiccated and About to Sell its Body Parts at a Discount. The waiter looks surprised to see me. It is like the time I went to the Varna Town Museum. They were so amazed to have a punter, they threw a party and served champagne.

Inside, the walls are covered with Martin Rowson cartoons. I like Rowson: he paints souls and his squashed and stretched faces bespeak rotting. There are books too — real books, not painted ones — and Peter Mandelson’s biography My Days as a Christopher Lee Impersonator is actually facing outwards.