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.)