It’s Britain’s most traditional form of protest: compact, versatile, eggalitarian (sorry), and loaded with the potential of being rotten. Even when fresh, organic, and free range, nothing strips a politician of his gravitas quite like a slick of yolk drooling down his lapels or shards of shell peppering his side parting. When they’re not being broken into retro bowls in the Bake Off tent they are being hurled at Tory party conference delegates by anti-austerity protesters in Manchester. We are, of course, talking about the humble egg.
Throwing perishables in protest has a long and often illustrious history. In AD63 the Roman governor Vespasian was pelted with turnips by subjects fed up with his punitive policies. Eggs made an appearance in the middle ages, when prisoners were regularly put in stocks and pelted with them. Elizabethan theatre-goers threw rotten eggs to protest against bad acting, which some might say is not so dissimilar to their use in the theatre of politics today. And in Middlemarch, set in the 1830s, George Eliot was familiar enough with the practice to subject Mr Brooke to the humiliating fate of a substantial egging during an election speech: “Here an unpleasant egg broke on Mr Brooke’s shoulder… then came a hail of eggs, chiefly aimed at the image, but occasionally hitting the original, as if by chance.”
And so political history marches on with egg, tomatoes, cream pie, green custard, slurry, purple flour bombs and, erm, chocolate eclairs on its face. This week it was a Tory conference attendee, apparently laughing and waving a picture of Margaret Thatcher at protesters, who got an egg to the forehead. But no party is immune to the ovum. In 2013 it was Ed Miliband, egged during a walkabout around Walworth Market in South London. Jim Murphy suspended his referendum tour of Scotland last year after being pelted with eggs in Kirkcaldy by Yes supporters. And it’s not always harmless either. During the 2004 Ukrainian presidential-election campaign, Viktor Yanukovych was rushed to hospital after being hit with what many thought was a brick but turned out to be an egg.
In the east they throw shoes, in Greece they practise yaourtama (the act of yoghurt-throwing as a form of protest), and in Ukraine they hang noodles on the gates of the Russian consulate.
In Britain, it will always be eggs. David Cameron, Nigel Farage, Ruth Kelly, George Galloway, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Nick Griffin, Simon Cowell, David Blaine: all have been egged with varying degrees of accuracy and response. Still most famous of all is John Prescott, North Wales, 2001, when the then deputy prime minister responded to a perfectly aimed egg hurled by a farm worker with a Kevin Keegan haircut by punching him in the face, creating the gif that never stops giving. Somehow, it doesn’t get more British than that.
