Top ten political food gaffes

The revelation that George Osborne ate a burger from Byron, an upmarket fast food chain, while preparing yesterday's spending round speech has sent the media buzzing with the kind of frenzy hitherto reserved for general election nights.

Osborne has defended his choice of posh nosh on the basis that “McDonalds doesn't deliver.” Accusations of him trying to appear "a man of the people" abound. But this is a popular story because it combines a number of factors: class, politics and–crucially–food.

This storm is far from the most serious political food disaster. It's not even the first burger-related faux pas. Here is our pick of the top ten political food gaffes.

1. A surfeit of lampreys

King Henry I was renowned for his monstrous appetite. Unfortunately his greedy lust for eating lampreys, aggressive eel-like fish, cost him his life in 1135. Contemporary sources describe him “choking on a surfeit of lampreys”. Many years later Charles Dickens wrote: “He died of an indigestion and fever, brought on by eating, when he was far from well, of a fish called Lamprey, against which he had often been cautioned by his physicians."

2. Alfred the cake burner

Many moons before “pastygate”, the King of Wessex, Alfred the Great had his own gastronomical gaffe. The story goes that in 878 AD, upon travelling to 'Egbert's Stone' near Selwood in Somerset, he was given shelter by a peasant woman who didn't realise his identity. She asked him to watch some cakes she had left cooking on the fire while she popped out. On her return she found that Alfred had let the cakes burn, so deep in thought was he about the affairs of his kingdom.

3. Jam doughnuts and freedom

“Ich bin ein Berliner,” proclaimed US President John F Kennedy, addressing the people of West Berlin in 1963. During the speech, perhaps one of JFK's most defining moments, his soaring oratory was deployed to offer America's solidarity to the people of West Germany during the Cold War. While he meant to express his support by describing himself as a Berliner – he accidentally told the crowd that he was a jam doughnut. His use of the indefinite article 'ein', urban legend has it, resulted in his speech being translated to refer to the local confectionary.

4. When David went bananas

Nearer to the present day, at the 2008 Labour Party conference David Miliband, then Foreign Secretary, met photographers armed with a banana. The resulting pictures were comedy gold for the Conservatives, who made life-sized cardboard cutouts of the image and placed them around the conference floor at their own gathering later that year.

5. More burger trouble

In May 1990 John Selwyn Gummer, minister for agriculture and food, was ridiculed after posing for a photo opportunity with his four-year-old daughter eating a beef burger to allay fears during the spread of BSE or "Mad Cow Disease". In the eight years since then 32 people died of Cruetzfeldt-Jakob Disease, the human form of BSE. Gummer was then forced to explain himself in front of a public inquiry on the infection.

6. Dumb spud

Perhaps not the sharpest tool in the shed, in 1992 US Vice-President Dan Quayle embarrassed himself while judging a school spelling bee. He wrongly tried to set a 12-year-old boy straight for spelling the word “potato” without the letter “e”.

7. Mushy Mandelson

Completely apocryphal but a funny story nonetheless: When still an MP, Peter Mandelson was once reported to have wandered into a fish and chip shop in his Hartlepool constituency and mistaken mushy peas for guacamole.

8. Pretzels in the White House

How can we forget this one? Former president George W Bush hit the headlines after reportedly choking on a pretzel at the White House. Dubya was watching an American football game on television when he choked on the snack, causing him to faint. While falling over he hit his left cheek, resulting in a rosy red bruise.

9. “Pastygate”

Last March George Osborne faced a seething public after announcing a VAT hike on hot takeaway food. Cue newspaper campaigns and questions in parliament to find out the last time he had eaten a cornish pasty. David Cameron was caught up in all of this when he was asked the same question by a reporter. He replied that it had been at Leeds train station, at a shop that had closed in 2007, three years before the pasty was supposed to have been consumed.

10. No, minister

In 1988 health minister Edwina Currie provoked outrage when she said during a television interview that most of Britain's egg production was infected with salmonella. Farmers and egg producers denounced her “highly irresponsible” comments. She also incensed northerners when she once claimed they were dying of “ignorance and chips."