Michael Gove invoked Kate Moss at cabinet on Tuesday as he warned right-wing Tories against “comfort eating” by pursuing hard-line policies that “make us feel good about ourselves”.
The levelling up secretary said that the Tories are at the best when they are united and have a “broad appeal” to the rest of the country after suffering heavy losses in the local elections.
He suggested the Tories should follow the controversial advice of Kate Moss, the model, from an interview in 2009. “As Kate Moss once said ‘nothing tastes as good as skinny feels’,” he said.
He also argued that the Tories risk drowning out the “wonderful orchestra” of their broad policy platform — including social justice, which he has championed — by focusing on right-wing measures.
“He was saying that just as the orchestra comes together we need to make sure voters hear different parts of our message,” a source said.
Advertisement
His comments provoked rejections from Chris Heaton-Harris, the Northern Ireland secretary, and Alister Jack, the Scotland secretary. Heaton-Harris said: “I enjoyed listening to his analysis but not his conclusions.” Jack said: “I disagree with you. We shouldn’t be apologists for what we believe in.”
Rishi Sunak has been urged by Tory MPs on the right of the party to change course after Labour won a string of victories across England, putting the party on track to form the next government.
Suella Braverman, a former home secretary, said that at this rate the Tories will be lucky to have any Tory MPs after the election. She and others on the right have urged Sunak to pursue tougher policies on legal migration and to implement further tax cuts before the general election.
Sunak has claimed that Britain is heading for a hung parliament. At the weekend he cited an analysis by Michael Thrasher, the elections expert, that if replicated at a general election the results would leave Labour 32 seats short of a majority, saying that Sir Keir Starmer would have to be “propped up” by the SNP, Liberal Democrats and Greens.
Sir John Curtice, the polling expert, also projected the Conservatives nine points behind in the national vote share but advised against using this data to estimate Westminster seats. He told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “It’s quite long been the case, certainly since the late 1980s, that the way that people vote in local elections doesn’t necessarily exactly mirror the way that they would vote in a general election.”
Advertisement
Isaac Levido, the election strategist who is running the Tory campaign, also gave an address to the cabinet. He highlighted the Thrasher analysis and said the gap between the Tories and Labour — though he admitted it was “real” — was closer than in national polls and argued that it would be significantly lower when the public hit the ballots.
Andrew Mitchell, the deputy foreign secretary, said that the fact the Tories came within 1,508 votes of Labour for the West Midlands mayoralty showed that there was a way forward.
When Moss said “nothing tastes as good as skinny feels” in an interview in 2009, she was heavily criticised for the remark and accused of encouraging eating disorders.
Asked if she had any mantras, she said: “There are loads of mottos. There’s ‘nothing tastes as good as skinny feels’. That’s one of them.” She added: “You try and remember, but it never works.” She has subsequently distanced herself from the comment.
In 2018 she said: “My friend used to say it. Because you know we were all living together, and we’d go ‘oh nothing tastes as g…’. It’s a little jingle.”
Advertisement
Speaking about the industry more broadly, she said: “There’s so much more diversity now, I think it’s right. There’s so many different sizes and colours and heights. Why would you just be a one-size model and being represented for all of these people?”