John Gummer is one of Britain’s longest serving politicians, still sitting in the House of Lords as The Lord Deben at the grand old age of eighty-five. He won his first seat - Lewisham West - in 1970, lost it in 1974 then won Suffolk Coastal Eye at the next election in 1979, holding it for thirty-one years until his retirement from the House of Commons in 2010.
He served three Conservative Prime Ministers in a variety of Cabinet roles including party chairman, has written a number of books, counts Andrew Lloyd Webber amongst his friends and was described by Friends of the Earth as “the best environment secretary we’ve ever had”.
Anyone who knows anything about the politics of the 1990s, however, is likely to agree that it is for a single moment in this long career that he will be remembered.
As Minister for Agriculture he was amongst the officials who had responsibility for food safety during the so-called ‘mad cow disease’ scare. He attempted, at a constituency event in the spring of 1990, to feed his four year old daughter Cordelia a burger to prove that British beef was safe.
The historical record often does not recall that Cordelia refused the burger. Presumably not because the toddler was concerned about British beef but rather because it was too hot. Gummer laughed off her reluctance and chomped down himself, telling the assembled photographers that it was “delicious.”
“Doing a Gummer” has entered the Westminster lexicon as a shorthand for any moment a politician bravely partakes of any product or engages in any action over the safety of which there is a question mark in order to reassure the public.
In ‘Please Sir, Don’t You Want Some More?’ we at Hunt & Gather have invited parliamentarians over the age of sixty-five to “do a Gummer” in relation to the products widely known as Covid 19 vaccines.
Why those over sixty-five? Because for the October 2024 vaccination campaign the JCVI - the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation - issued guidance that everyone over that age should be offered the jabs. The research we carried out in November in preparation for this project indicated there were (then) fifty-three MPs who qualified by age.
We are writing to all of them to ask whether they have taken up the offer. With safety concerns about the Covid 19 shots now an established talking point in the mainstream as well as the alternative media would they be prepared, we wondered, to revive this Westminster tradition and “do a Gummer” in order to reassure their constituents and the wider public?
We have broken the results into nine batches of five and one batch of seven in order to make the resulting video episodes convenient in length and we will be releasing these weekly, starting today, on all platforms on which we publish. For each of them we have tried to provide examples of previous occasions on which these MPs have offered public enthusiasm for the vaccination programme. It is not in our view unreasonable to ask them for a public endorsement of these medical products, given that in most cases they were offering this unbidden and with full throats in 2021/22.
The five MPs we are featuring in Episode 1, along with the parties and constituencies they represent, are:
Afzhal Khan (Labour) Manchester Rusholme.
Clive Efford (Labour) Eltham and Chislehurst
Barry Gardiner (Labour) Brent West
Bob Blackman (Conservative) Harrow East
Andy McDonald (Labour) Middlesborough and Thornaby East
Mr Khan was one of a number of South Asian MPs who participated in a video that was released on social media in 2021 in an attempt to encourage South Asian people to roll up their sleeves for a shot, following the revelation that there was more vaccine hesitancy within that demographic than the population at large.
He also voted with Boris Johnson’s government in December 2021 in a controversial bill to make positive vaccination status - or a negative test - a condition of entry to certain venues, when a Conservative rebellion of 99 MPs was only neutralised by a lot of help from Labour.
Mr Efford posted a video on his website in May 2021 of himself receiving a second jab and told his constituents: “If you get a call make sure you make your appointment and get your vaccination.”
Mr Gardiner abstained from voting in the vaccine pass bill but he did post a video of himself being jabbed in March 2021. A month later he posted an article explaining why he was opposed to the idea of vaccine passports, stating that they would represent a breach of the Public Health (Control of Disease) Act 1984. He quotes the act: “Regulations… may not include provision requiring a person to undergo medical treatment.”
Mr Gardiner does not state this, however, until he has made his feelings about vaccinations in general clear: “I believe it is important that everyone who is offered a vaccination should take it for their own sake and for the sake of the wider community,” he says.
Mr Blackman was the only Conservative on our list this week and a vocal critic of the idea of vaccine passes and passports. His X feed from the time, though, shows him to have been an enthusiastic supporter of these products and their wide usage, with frequent exhortations to his constituents to take them up.
Mr McDonald was silent on social media on the subject of vaccines, as far as we could discover - but he did lend his vote to the Conservatives so they could bring in their draconian vaccine pass bill.
This is the letter that we sent to the five on November 26 2024:
We gave them two weeks to reply, but none of them did. None of them told us they took an injection in October 2024. None of them told us they didn’t. None of them told us anything at all. This stands in marked contrast to their earlier enthusiasm as set out above.
For some reason none of the MPs we have asked so far are willing to “do a Gummer” and allay public concerns about the safety of these products with a personal endorsement.
Fewer than 200 people are thought to have died during the British beef scare that prompted Mr Gummer’s heroic consumption of a burger.
MPs asked: 5
Positive responses: 0
Join us next week for the next five names on our list.
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