Twelve years ago today, my dad sold Ed Miliband that bacon sandwich. This is what you didn't see

Twelve years ago today, my Dad found himself at the centre of one of the most famous photographs in political history, which would go on to make Britain's most senior politicians a worldwide laughingstock, and indirectly influence the result of the 2015 election.

Cast your mind back. It’s May 2014, and campaigning is nearly at an end for the local and European Parliament elections.

Britain has a coalition government, with Conservative David Cameron as Prime Minister and Liberal Democrat Nick Clegg as Deputy PM.

Britain is still in the EU, but David Cameron is promising a referendum on leaving should he win the general election the following year.

He’s dangling this carrot in a desperate attempt to thwart Nigel Farage’s UKIP, which - riding a wave of anti-EU sentiment - is expecting to make huge gains in the imminent European Parliamentary elections.

And Ed Miliband is the leader of the Labour Party.

Keen to show his pro-business credentials on the campaign trail, on the early morning of May 21st 2014, the day before the election, Miliband and his team head to New Covent Garden flower market.

Located in Vauxhall, just a few minutes' drive away from Parliament, it’s the largest wholesale flower market in London, full of traders and small businesses who work the long overnight hours stocking the flower shops of the South East.

Miliband and his team probably thought this would be a day like any other. A few handshakes and conversations with some of the traders and customers in the market, and a couple of good photo opportunities surrounded by colourful flowers from Holland, Colombia, and the rest of the world.

He could even buy a beautiful bunch of blooms for Mrs Miliband...what could possibly go wrong?

Little did they know that the photo opportunity would haunt Miliband forever.

One of the market stands he ended up at was the cafe belonging to my Dad, Antonios Foufas.

Dad had worked in the market for around forty years at this point, and his cafe selling teas, coffees, cakes and various other refreshments was a regular pit stop for customers and traders alike. But there was one delicacy they’d queue out the door for: his bacon sandwich.

Someone in Miliband's team clearly got wind of this because the then-Labour Party leader and his minions turned up for a chat, a photo, and a chance to taste that famous sarnie.

Dad wasn’t phased at all by meeting one of the most senior politicians in Britain. Over the years, his cafe had been visited by all sorts of famous people, so for him it was all in a day’s work.

But what followed changed the course of political history.

Because the awkward, almost inhuman way in which Ed Miliband was pictured eating that bacon sandwich has become one of the most famous pictures ever taken of a politician.

It was a photographer for the Evening Standard who snapped Ed’s battling bacon blunder, to publish that afternoon. Every gurn, mouth gyration, weird facial expression, and over- exaggerated chew was caught in a series of pictures which the then-Labour leader would never live down.

“Ed Miliband's battle with a bacon sandwich as he buys flowers for his wife at London market,” the Standard story read, accompanied by what has become known as one of the least flattering and most famous pictures in political history.

Later that day, every online news outlet ran with the story and picture. By the next morning, it had gone global with news coverage, internet memes, and social media hashtags with #EdEats trending worldwide.

The picture itself wasn’t the only humiliation. During his time in the cafe, journalists had asked Dad what he and Miliband had discussed, and whether he’d be voting for him.

“I find the Conservatives are more pro-business,” was Dad’s reply. The final indignity for the Labour leader.

Meanwhile, the ramifications of bacon-gate continued. The then-speaker of the House of Commons, Jon Bercow, banned a film crew visiting Parliament from picturing MPs eating for fear of another MP being caught out.

TV shows and social media continued to mock Miliband mercilessly. They still do today.

And when the 2015 general election took place the following year, on the morning polling stations opened, The Sun newspaper used that very picture on their front page, imploring voters to ‘Save our Bacon’ and avoid voting for Miliband.

David Cameron went on to win, secure a majority, and fulfil his promise of an in-out EU referendum, which took place the following year.

Could it be said that my Dad is ultimately the reason for Brexit? Maybe.

But as Miliband edges once again closer to Downing Street, with many predicting he’ll be Prime Minister or Chancellor if Andy Burnham doesn’t get there first, it’s worth considering how my Dad ended up working at the Flower Market in the first place, and in the position to sell Ed that famous snack.

It’s the late 1960s. He and my Mother are a holiday love story. My Mum, in Greece to visit her family, meets my Dad, a waiter, and they fall in love. He moves to Britain, with only the money from selling his motorbike, and marries Mum in 1970.

Times were tough. They had nothing. No money, no dowry, no home, no qualifications between them, no assets and no help from the state whatsoever.

Dad took any job he could. Waiter, mechanic, night worker, anything he could get. Mum did too; she worked as a receptionist, a dinner lady, or any other job available. It was the 1970s, the economy was dire, Britain was in debt, jobs were hard to come by, taxes were high, strikes were plentiful, and their prospects were grim.

They scrimped and saved to buy their first home, a tiny terraced house. They struggled for years to send my Dad to catering college in the hope it would lead to something.

One of my earliest memories was them sharing a meal, whilst my older brother and I ate. “We’re not that hungry” they used to say, prioritising making sure he and I were properly fed.

Despite the fact that we were dirt poor, I never went to school without breakfast, a packed lunch, and a clean school uniform. Mum used to be militant about making sure name tags were sewn in anything I owned; I now know it was because we simply couldn’t afford to replace them if they were lost at school.

By the early eighties, one of my Dad’s dead-end jobs was working in a food caravan overnight outside Covent Garden Flower Market. When the business went bankrupt - owing to appalling management - my Dad saw an opportunity.

As did the rest of the country, because by this time Margaret Thatcher - a leader my family owe so much to - had been in power a few years and her policies, of making the UK more pro-business, rolling back the state, cutting red tape, making it easier to get finance, were all starting to come to fruition.

I must have been around four years old when I remember my Mum proudly ironing a gleaming white chef’s jacket for my Dad and her telling me what an important night it was. Dad was finally starting his own business.

Thatcher had created the climate where my Dad was able to do this. He started selling teas, coffees and food from mobile trollies on the flower market trading floor, filling the gap left behind by the now closed caravan.

Within months, things changed. There was food on the table. The car could get fixed. Mum didn't have to patch up clothes any more. We were able to go shopping. We could go on holiday. Everything got better.

Of course, it came at a cost, and that was in my Dad’s time. As Covent Garden is an night market, and we lived over an hour away, he’d sleep in the afternoon to be up at 10pm for work.

He’d leave around 11pm and arrive at just before midnight. Then he’d prep the food for the trollies, before being ready to sell at the market opening time, 2am.

He’d work through, selling until 11am, then have to clear everything away, he’d be out of the market by midday, before getting to the cash and carry to restock. He’d usually get home at around 3pm and have to do admin, before then doing exactly the same thing the next night.

They were long, gruelling hours, out of the house for at least sixteen hours a day, working his backside off, barely spending time with his family. Sunday lunches were sacred as it was one of the only times the four of us sat down and ate at the same time.

But he did it for his family to give us better lives and to make something of himself. I’ll forever be grateful to him.

Within a few years, he’d expanded to have a number of staff and food trollies, before eventually taking a cafe in the market, then also opening a flower import company. Mum also opened businesses; she owned flower shops. Both were working as many hours as they could.

And it started to pay off. We moved to one of the nicest roads in our city. There were two Mercedes outside the new house. We owned a holiday home. Dad was able to buy his Mother in Greece her own home outright for the first time, moving her from the run-down rental he’d grown up in. I’ll never forget the pride in my Dad’s face when he was able to return home to Greece with money in his back pocket, able to help his family who’d stayed behind.

The man who had moved to the UK with absolutely nothing, who’d left school at 13, had done well, through sheer hard work, determination and being a brilliant businessman.

And that’s what Thatcher’s Britain was all about. She laid the foundations for those with aspiration and a willingness to work hard to better themselves. In an interview once, she explained what she perceived ‘Thatcherism’ to be:

“I believe passionately that people have a right, by their own efforts, to benefit their own families, so we have taken down taxation. It doesn’t matter to me who you are or what your background is. If you want to use your own efforts to work harder—yes, I am with you all the way”

Nothing sums up my Mum and Dad’s situation more than that quote. They were prepared to work every hour they could in their own businesses for their family, and it was the government’s role to help them keep more of their own money, and to help them help themselves by removing the barriers that stopped them.

That is true aspiration and true reward.

Does anyone really believe we’d get that from Ed Miliband? Or Andy Burnham?

And isn’t there an irony that the man who sold Ed Miliband the sandwich that ended his career got there via an ideology which is the complete opposite of what Red Ed believes in? And as we’ve now discovered, Andy Burnham too. His latest promotional video, ignoring years of Labour governments since she left office in 1990, pledges to ‘reverse Thatcherism’.

And that sums up a Labour Party today which has killed the aspiration Thatcher stood for. There’s no way my parents, with their backgrounds, could be rewarded for starting businesses in the way they were in the eighties under Starmer, Burnham, Miliband, any of the Labour leaders we have today.

The energy policies which Miliband promotes, far from reducing energy costs for businesses, are making them higher than ever. He’s in a cabinet which has presided over the highest tax burden in history. The latest unemployment figures show it’s rising, not falling. The tax and national insurance burden on businesses means insolvencies are rising.

Business regulation, red tape, and employment rights make profit less likely and business more difficult.

Burnham’s video denouncing Thatcherism shows clearly he’s of the same anti- business mindset as the rest of his party. That laying the foundations for business and people to thrive just aren’t on his agenda. His derision of ‘Thatcherism’ and the loss of manufacturing jobs under her is laughable hypocrisy when you consider he in the Blair and Brown governments he served in saw a reduction of 8% in manufacturing business- during Thatcher's time as PM, the UK lost about 2.5 per cent.

What a shame people like my Dad and Mum just just would’t have a chance to be entrepreneurial in this climate of admin and envy from our current leaders.

Why would anyone want to put in the hours these days, in order to fail, primarily due to restrictions, business taxes and re- tape being put in their way? And if you do make a success of yourself, if you do manage to buy an expensive house, the government will throw extra taxes onto you anyway.

That’s the precise opposite of what government’s should be doing.

Thatcher wasn’t perfect, some of her policies with hindsight do need adjusting for the times we’re now in. But I believe no other leader has laid the foundations for a truly equal society via aspiration and hard work more effectively than her. It didn’t matter how you started,, where you came from, what your background or class, if you were prepared to go for it, she was right behind you.

Mum and Dad, well into their seventies now, still work. Dad’s no longer at the flower market in the cafe, instead he now drives for my brother doing deliveries for his flower import company, and Mum works as a classroom assistant in a secondary school. They’re still not able to sit around, relax and do nothing, I’m not sure they ever will.

If Dad still owned the cafe, I'd be hoping Miliband, Burnham, Starmer, Reeves and Rayner would all pop back for a bacon sarnie. Maybe some unflattering pictures of them all is the only thing that can save us now, it certainly saved us from a Miliband government twelve years ago.

What will save us now?

I once met Ed Miliband and a press event, and I couldn’t wait to excitedly tell him it was my Dad who told him that infamous sandwich.

Unsurprisingly he didn’t share my enthusiasm and really wasn’t up for chatting.