‘Pot, kettle, prat’: are our politicians too ‘out of touch’ to deal with the cost-of-living crisis?

Outgoing prime minister Boris Johnson has been criticised for being “out of touch” after some people thought he was suggesting that Britons buy a £20 kettle to save £10 in electricity bills over the next 12 months.

Having been largely absent from the public eye for the past few months, Johnson used his final policy speech before leaving office to promise £700m of funding for the Sizewell C nuclear power project as part of a drive to improve the UK’s energy security.

But the PM attracted most attention when he made “a bizarre analogy about buying a new kettle”, the Daily Mirror said.

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Comparing the benefits of investing in nuclear plants to reducing energy bills by buying a new kettle, Johnson said: “If you have an old kettle which takes ages to boil, it may cost you £20 to replace it – but if you get a new one, you’ll save £10 a year every year on your electricity bill.”

While he may have been trying to make a point about the importance of investing in nuclear power, his words were “taken out of context on social media”, said HuffPost, and “widely mocked for appearing like real, cost of living advice”.

Nazir Afzal, a former chief prosecutor and now chancellor of the University of Manchester, tweeted: “We have waited ages for Boris Johnson & the Govt of which Liz Truss is a part [of] to advise us [on] what we should do about the extraordinary living crisis that we are facing and FINALLY who knew the answer was a NEW KETTLE?”

Another Twitter user said Johnson’s “legacy will be cemented as an out of touch cluster of idiocy”.

Are our politicians out of touch?

Johnson is far from alone in failing to connect with ordinary voters at a time of economic hardship, which is set to worsen as the energy price cap soars past £3,500 in October.

Kit Malthouse attracted criticism in April when the then policing minister said in an interview that the cost-of-living crisis would be “tricky” for him despite his salary of £115,824 being “more than three times the average annual wage of a full-time worker in the UK”, the Daily Record said.

Graham Hutton, chairman of the Newcastle-under-Lyme Conservative Association, has also sparked anger for claiming that many households using food banks during the escalating crisis do not need to do so, insisting that rising costs are being “overplayed”.

In an interview with the i news site, Hutton, who the paper notes is the director of a management consultancy company, said “an awful lot” of food bank users do so “because it’s free food and they wouldn’t pass on something free”. He added that people should “put on another jumper” this winter to save on heating bills.

And it isn’t just the Tories who have provoked fury for failing to grasp the gravity of the political moment. In April, shadow levelling up secretary Lisa Nandy warned Labour leader Keir Starmer that his obsession with Partygate risked making the party look “out of touch” when people were struggling to pay their bills.

She said there was a risk that the public would think “we’re all as bad as each other” if Labour continued to pursue Downing Street’s lockdown breaches rather than laying out plans to address the growing economic crisis, the Daily Mail reported.

Since then, Starmer has expressed solidarity with people struggling with their bills, describing how his own family’s phone was cut off for “months at a time” when he was a child, Sky News said. The Labour leader said he was not claiming he grew up in “great poverty” but that he understood the difficulties many households are now facing.

So far, his efforts appear to be working, with a recent poll by Redfield & Wilton Strategies, on behalf of the i news site, revealing that the public believes Starmer would make a better PM than either Liz Truss or Rishi Sunak.

Are such political missteps costly?

Back in May, in the wake of a previous fumbled defence of the government’s record on the cost of living by the prime minister, Tories expressed concern about the impact it would have on their electoral chances.

When asked about a pensioner who was forced to travel around on buses to stay warm and keep heating bills down, Johnson’s first response had been to boast that he introduced free travel for older people.

Responding to the comments, one backbencher and former cabinet minister told The Guardian: “It won’t have won us many votes. Boris doesn’t actually care about these people. He basically despises most of the human race, so that makes it quite difficult for him to sympathise.”

Sure enough, when the local elections came around, the Tories lost hundreds of seats to Labour and the Liberal Democrats, including swaths of the party’s southern heartlands and several flagship London boroughs.