Raising the russet
I’ve been thinking about potatoes a lot recently.
Not in an autumnal, oh I’d love a butter roasted spud kind of way. Rather in a Prussian, royal ruse fashion.
Because as everyone debates the use of Englands St George’s flag in the recent activation of nationalism around towns and marching in the capital, it reminded me of a tale I once heard from the legendary Rory Sutherland.
For when Frederick the Great of 18th century Prussia was presiding over a German people in famine he was desperate to add potatoes to people diets alongside wheat as the only other carb. The problem was they looked disgusting. Beige, covered in mud, flavourless.
He tried the tactic many councils are employing with the flags currently popping across Blighty and went with the compulsory route, making a law that made people do something (or in the case of flags not do something). But what he found, as any good disobedient child knows, was that the more he wanted something to happen, the more people rebelled.
So he tried the subterfuge angle.
Instead he made Potato’s the official royal vegetable and passed a law that only Royals could eat them. To rub the peasant’s noses in it he openly planted them in public gardens and attained Royal Guards around the patches.
But unknown to them he told them to not to guard them very well and it turned out that there is nothing a hungry peasant wants to steal more than a badly guarded royal veg, and before long an underground potato growing network popped up.
~~~
So how would Fred handle the flags issue in England 200 years on if he didn’t want them being claimed by those who wish to make them a symbol of anti-immigration?
He could try risking the ire and tit for tat of the Cambridge Council approach but I can’t help but feel he would have leant on King Charles and used Trump’s visit and the pomp of the state visit to make a new royal decree.
“One will have witnessed the resplendent reds and whites of our national flag in Windsor and as you flew across this great land”
“For as you’ve seen we are a welcoming nation to all, wherever they arrived from - helicopter or boat”
“So to make this special day, and those who wish to make this country great as you have America, I do hereby decree the launch of the Great British Fundraiser”
“Anyone flying the St George’s and Union Jack standard outside their home or placing it in public will be doing so as a public declaration that they want their country back and now wish to pay a £100 a month contribution to this newly launch fund to help rebuild the communities of this great nation and collectors will visit them as a priority”
“It’s ones intention that the first grant rounds will go towards supporting community projects that involve white paint and roundabouts as well as local refugee charities”
~~~
Could one nail one’s colours to that mast? I’ll ask guards to not guard it while you do.