A Tunbridge Wells diarist reads about British husbands attending dinner parties mainly to check for Sky Sports and remembers the most famous dinner in Labour history
Saturday, 24 October 2026. Royal Tunbridge Wells, Kent. My dining room after a dinner for six, the good china washed by hand because the dishwasher has opinions, a half-empty bottle of claret, 11.20pm.
Why Husbands Really Go
The London Prat has a report on British dinner parties and why husbands mainly go to check for Sky Sports. It is presented as research, with an institute, fieldworkers in the downstairs loo and twenty-two dinners observed. The findings are devastating. Men can discuss football for six hours and contemporary art for three minutes. The most dangerous phrase at the table is you know what I think. By twenty to eleven, nine in ten men are in the hallway discussing leaving while the host loads the dishwasher herself.
I hosted six tonight. My late husband would have fitted every finding. He went to dinner parties for the sport, the cheese and the opportunity to disagree with somebody’s brother-in-law about interest rates. He never once discussed contemporary art. He did once discuss a Damien Hirst, at a dinner in Sevenoaks, and described it as a sheep in a tank, which, to be fair, it was.
The Most Famous Dinner In Labour History
But the piece sent my mind to a different sort of dinner party: the Islington kind. There is a particular breed of London Labour supporter, comfortably off, beautifully educated, with a large house in a Georgian terrace and a conscience that is entirely theoretical, who gives dinner parties where everybody agrees about everything. The food is excellent. The wine is organic. The conversation consists of eight people competing to be the most outraged about inequality before going home to houses worth two million pounds.
The most famous of these dinners took place in 1994, at a restaurant called Granita on Upper Street in Islington. Tony Blair and Gordon Brown met there after the death of John Smith, and legend has it that they agreed which of them would run for the Labour leadership, with Blair taking the job and Brown taking the Treasury and, supposedly, a promise of the succession. Both men later gave different accounts of what was said. Nobody has ever agreed on the menu. It is the only dinner party in British history to have caused a decade of government.
Who Checked For The Football
If the Prat’s research had been conducted at Granita, I suspect the findings would have been different. Nobody was checking for Sky Sports. Both men were checking for the premiership, which in their case was not a football league. The rest of the evening, according to the many accounts, was devoted to the art of not quite saying what one meant, which is the true national sport of the Labour Party. The dishwasher was presumably loaded by the restaurant, which is the advantage of conducting coups in public.
Gordon Brown, of course, is a devoted football fan, a supporter of Raith Rovers in his native Fife. I mention this only because the Daily Mash recently carried a story claiming that attending a Raith Rovers exorcism is exactly what a prime minister should be doing. I read it twice and decided not to ask.
The Champagne Socialist At My Table
I had one at my own table tonight, a nephew’s partner, who works in something called impact consultancy, which as far as I can tell means telling companies they are bad and then charging them for it. He arrived in a car that cost more than my first house, expressed concern about the cost of living, ate three helpings of my beef Wellington and then explained that meat is destroying the planet. I asked whether he would like a fourth helping. He said yes. That is the champagne socialist in his natural habitat: devoted to the cause, as long as somebody else is cooking.
My late husband would have asked him about Sky Sports. I asked him about tax. He said he was in favour of higher taxes for the rich. I asked whether he was rich. He said not really, just comfortable. In my experience, everybody who supports higher taxes on the rich believes the rich are somebody else, usually somebody slightly richer than themselves.
The Hallway At Twenty To Eleven
The Prat’s research held true tonight. At twenty to eleven, my nephew and his partner were in the hallway discussing whether to leave. The impact consultant was explaining to my nephew that they needed to get back to Islington, which they did by car, at speed, in a vehicle that would cost the planet more than my beef. My oldest friend, a retired magistrate, stayed behind to help me wash up, as she has done for forty years. She said nothing about inequality. She simply dried the plates. That is the difference, I think, between the people who talk about doing good and the people who actually do the dishes.
Bedtime Thoughts
The claret is finished. The china is drying. I have resolved to host a dinner party next month with a strict rule that nobody may discuss politics, which means it will be silent for four hours. Granita, I gather, is long closed, which is a pity. It deserved a blue plaque reading: here, two men agreed to disagree about who agreed to what, and the country paid the bill. It would be the most accurate plaque in London.
