Ed ‘Two Kitchens’ Miliband’s Mate: ‘It’s more of a kitchenette’

An interview designed to paint Ed Miliband as a man-of-the-people has hugely backfired, as it emerged that a BBC interview featuring the Milibands sipping tea was filmed in the smaller of two kitchens in their London mansion. Valiant attempts by friends to defend Mr Miliband and his wife by suggesting that it wasn’t a kitchen as you “can’t even sit in it”, merely put the boot in.

The Labour leader has been dubbed “two kitchens” this morning on social media, in reference to his colleague John “two Jags” Prescott, another man-of-the-people who has been repeatedly mocked for his love of top-of-the-range cars.

The mockery followed a sympathetic BBC interview with Justine Thornton, Mr Miliband’s wife, in which she attempted to deflect “really vicious, really personal” attacks on her husband. “I think this goes way beyond Ed as an individual, I think it’s about whether decencies and principle count for something in political life,” she said.

The couple were pictured walking their children hand in hand through a leafy park and sipping tea from blue striped mugs in a white, featureless kitchen. But the austerity of the small kitchen – whose only splash of colour comes from what appears to be a large green recycling bin, prompted columnist Sarah Vine, wife of Tory chief whip Michael Gove, to ridicule the “mirthless Milibands”.

“If it’s true that the kitchen is the heart of the home, then this one — and possibly its owner, too — requires an urgent transplant … It’s the kitchen of a woman who considers domestic matters well below her pay-grade,” she wrote, warning that, if the kitchen was anything to go by, Britain under a Miliband government would be “made in the image of that sad, self-consciously modest Miliband kitchen: bland, functional, humourless, cold and about as much fun to live in as a Communist era housing block in Minsk.”

Disasterously, fellow columnist Jenni Russell, whose child has Mr Miliband as a Godfather, took to Twitter to defend the couple by pointing out that the room was only their second kitchen; more of a kitchenette really.

Ed Miliband’s kitchen is lovely. Daily Mail pix: the functional kitchenette by sitting room for tea and quick snacks.

— Jenni Russell (@jennirsl) March 12, 2015

She then struck out at the “two kitchens” moniker by exclaiming “it’s not 2 kitchens! [You] Can’t even sit in it.”

@hugorifkind it’s not 2 kitchens! More like Times’ tea prep area. Can’t even sit in it.

— Jenni Russell (@jennirsl) March 12, 2015

Journalist Hugo Rifkind shot back “I stand with the mono-kitchened working person, united against the two-kitchened liberal elite.”

The Mail‘s Matt Chorley asked Ms Russell: “A back up in case everything comes out half baked?”

Whilst twitter user Mat Vaillancourt noted that “Posh people call this a ”cuisine d’été'”

According to the Telegraph, a “bizarre row” then ensued, with Conservative MP Nigel Adams saying: “Clearly there’s no cost of living crisis for ‘Two Kitchens’ Miliband. It’s a bit rich lecturing people about poverty from his £2 million mansion. Red Ed can try as much as he likes to portray himself as a man of the people but the only people he’s in touch with are the North London metropolitan elite.”

This is not the first time that Labour has come under fire for being out of touch in recent months. In November of last year shadow minister Emily Thornberry was forced to resign from Mr Miliband’s shadow cabinet after tweeting a picture of a house adorned with English flags with the comment “image from Rochester”.

She later said that she had tweeted the image because she found the house “amazing”, before adding that criticism of her tweet revealed “a somewhat prejudiced attitude towards Islington.”