The EU, we learned this week, now refers to any impossible demand by Britain as “cake”, including the leaked Brexit white paper. It suspected “cake would be coming”, and made the appropriate arrangements. Lest this put us in mind of a clown fight, let us recall Boris Johnson’s clever policy on cake: he is “pro having it and pro eating it”.
The impossibility of having your cake and eating it is a modern reversal: the original, as a 1546 compendium of English proverbs has it, goes: “Wolde ye bothe eate your cake, and haue your cake?” Oddly, it has also sometimes meant a regulatory environment – “a body or ‘cake’ of laws and customs” (1872), of the kind that even Johnson would surely not gobble.
The last time the word “cake” was newsworthy was when it was the name of a “made-up drug” that caused disorientation due to swelling in the brain region known as “Shatner’s Bassoon”. After learning of this scourge on Chris Morris’s satire Brass Eye (1997), the Tory MP David Amess asked about it in parliament. One explanation for the current permashambles, indeed, might be that the whole Conservative party is still off its face on cake in both senses.
