Lunch at Portcullis House

I had lunch today at Portcullis House, the office building across from the Palace of Westminster where I do most of my work for my MP.



For £2.20, or roughly $4.00, I had one of the best meals I have ever had outside of a real sit-down restaurant. My menu was:

Mediterranean Vegetable Moussaka: £1.20
Roast Potatoes with basil, thyme and rosemary: 40p
Apple and Celery soup w/ French baguette: 60p
House of Commons bottled water: Free

All this was served on Houses of Commons flatware and Oneida silverware on a fig tree-lined cafe terrasse in the beautiful central atrium shown above. And just in case some extremist jihadi decided he wanted to suicide-bomb me, I had twenty roaming policemen with machine-guns patrolling behind the bomb-proof glass doors. Compare that with the staid locale of the LSE Brunch Bowl, where I would have paid at least £2.50 for either a medium salad bowl, or for a large serving of indifferently cooked institutional pasta (with choice of sauce) and could easily be killed by an Al-Qaida recruit taking advantage of the disproportionate amount of Americans studying there.

Anyway, being pampered thus with such ridiculously subsidised services, made it clear why so many politicians are swayed by the belief that government provision is the panacea to all the ills of the world. If LSE were going to put out the same stuff, subsidised as they are, it would STILL be a £10 bill quite easily. Whatever you might think of pukka-spewing celeb-chef Jamie Oliver, when you see how hard he fights the bureaucracy just to get a 13p increase per student for meals on his new show, the blatant largesse doled out upon Britain's public servants becomes all the more disturbing. Perhaps it's a fit of soap-boxery, but I propose that all the funding increases in school lunches come from the budget of Portcullis House, letting the prices in the cafeterias here adjust with market values rather than continuing with these exceedingly distorting policies. So, awaiting the day when justice is delivered and the market allocates as only it can, you shall find me by the constantly stoked fireplace in the Tory Dining Hall, cosying into a plush red armchair awaiting High Tea from the tuxedoed waitstaff.


Addendum--Monday, 28 February 2005

My learned friend, Mr. Byron Rienstra, the scourge of cellular service providers, has informed me that the meals at the Brunch Bowl are in fact NOT subsidized; rather, they are set at cost, unlike those at Bankside, where they are partially offset by the rent paid by the residents.