Ric Holden calls a Westminster hall debate on pie-and-mash shops

In his parliamentary sketch for The Critic, Robert Hutton catches up with Ric Holden, whom he finds displaying a new-found enthusiasm for pie-and-mash shops:

A few months ago, Holden was the chairman of the greatest election-winning machine in history, the British Conservative Party. Now he is just a humble opposition backbencher. Some might say his demotion was deserved. He did after all oversee a campaign that set a number of records, including lowest Conservative share ever and most seats lost by a government ever. But those people miss a very important point: although Holden waved goodbye to 250 colleagues in July, he did succeed in saving his own skin. 

When his Durham seat was abolished, he realised that he had always, at heart, been an Essex man, and fled south to the ultra-safe constituency of Basildon and Billericay. Not that it stayed ultra-safe for long. Under his stewardship, the Conservative majority fell from 20,000 to just 20. You could see why he’d felt that a seat with a majority of, say, 19,000 wouldn’t have been enough. 

This all explains why on Tuesday afternoon, Holden was in a room off Westminster Hall where MPs are allowed to raise matters that are likely to be of limited interest. Officially, he was there to ask the government to save a Cockney delicacy by giving it official protected status. Really, he was there to beg the government to save Ric Holden.