Constitutional Crisis

Trump has managed to turn geopolitics into a farce, but back home we are doing something arguably more British, which is having a mild constitutional crisis over marmalade.

Not the price of energy, not housing, not whether we are drifting into a trade cul de sac. Marmalade. A jar of orange preserve has somehow been promoted to the front line of national sovereignty, as if Paddington is about to be stopped at Dover and asked to declare his sandwiches.

The claim, breathlessly repeated, is that "they" are renaming marmalade. That this is the thin end of the wedge. Today marmalade, tomorrow the Magna Carta, presumably by teatime.

The reality is rather less stirring. The EU has relaxed its definition so that "marmalade" can cover a wider range of fruit preserves. The horror. To cope with this outbreak of definitional flexibility, British producers may have to say "orange marmalade" or "citrus marmalade" on the label. One imagines shoppers collapsing in confusion, wandering the aisles muttering, "But what is this citrus substance?"

The slightly awkward detail, which has been quietly left in the airing cupboard, is that we did this in the first place. In the 1970s, Britain insisted that marmalade should mean citrus only. We drew a line in the sugary sand and told Europe, quite firmly, that marmalade was not to be trifled with. It was one of those moments of national clarity, up there with decimalisation and flared trousers.

And just to make it all a bit more absurd, the word itself is not even British. "Marmalade" comes from the Portuguese marmelada, a quince paste made from marmelo - quince. In other words, the original marmalade was not orange at all, but a sort of firm quince jelly eaten in slices. We imported the word, changed the meaning, enforced it on Europe, and are now affronted that Europe has stopped following our instructions quite so obediently.

And yet the reaction has been predictably operatic. You can almost hear the violins as commentators speak of heritage, tradition, and the quiet dignity of the breakfast table, as though a jar of marmalade were the last line of defence against continental chaos.

Meanwhile, in the real world, most jars already say "Seville orange marmalade", because producers quite like telling you what is in them. This has not, to date, triggered social collapse.

What makes this oddly revealing is how neatly it fits the pattern. A small, technical adjustment becomes a cultural grievance. A labelling tweak is inflated into an existential threat. And the fact that we wrote the original rule ourselves is treated as an inconvenient footnote, rather than the entire story.

It is a bit like insisting your classic car must only ever run on a particular grade of fuel, arguing about it for decades, and then becoming furious when the rest of the garage shrugs and says, "Fine, use what you like."

So here we are. A country that once ran a global empire now reduced to arguing about the wording on a breakfast spread we defined ourselves half a century ago.

Still, I suppose it is progress of a sort. At least this time, the argument is unlikely to end in a referendum. Or, more worryingly, it might.