When I was 19, I achieved my first promotion. Up until that point, with the exception of my paper round, I had been sacked from every job I’d ever been given. However, this misfortune finally came to an end in the kitchen of York’s David Lloyd. A Head Chef, by the name of Peter, had identified me as a talented cleaner of plates and believed I had the potential to be a cook. For someone who he had witnessed take up smoking just to unlock the extra work breaks, I was quite surprised to be presented with this opportunity. I even explained to Peter how unqualified I was, and that I didn’t even cook at home on account of me very recently being a child. He dismissed this as simple insecurity and, with the offer of forty pence extra an hour, I donned the chef whites, picked up a knife and pretended to care.
For a very short period, things went very well. As I was so shit at cooking but feigned enthusiasm, Peter saw an opportunity to be my Yorkshire Mr Miyagi, allowing me to take as long as I wanted to chop whatever it was that needed chopping. However, the honeymoon was short lived. Peter was a genuine chef who, according to himself, had worked in some of London’s top restaurants. David Lloyd was clearly a result of some sort of breakdown, and being labelled as ‘The King of Ping’ by the teenage waiting staff, who had observed his six microwave assistants, he was someone whose glass was at its brim. To combat whatever had gone wrong in London, he attempted to raise the standards in this gym kitchen, mainly through whining and bouts of aggression. He was joined in this pursuit by his Second Chef, Michael, who, although unable to cook, was thick enough to believe his cooking was worthy of acclaim. Crucially, Michael also had an inferiority complex that was off the scale. This meant that he took his status as Second Chef seriously and would follow Peter down mad rabbit holes of attempted standard raising.
My promotion was, therefore, the collateral damage of this double act’s aspirations to win the world’s first Michelin star from microwave cookery. Even so, what they hadn’t observed in their idealism was my desire to spend all of my downtime in nightclubs, waterboarding my liver with as much as it could endure. This meant that Peter’s prodigy regularly attended work profusely sweating, with an irritable bowl and a desire for total silence. Cue multiple disputes with my superiors over issues as big as adding chips to my ‘simple sandwich’, theft (as dared to eat one of the hundreds of sausages we cooked) and, a crime which Peter deemed worthy of pointing a knife at my face, forgetting that a burger needed a side of peas.
Even though Peter and Michael were awful to work with as they were so clichéd and humourless, I did deserve their hatred. Cheffing and excessive evenings are not a cocktail that can be sustained for longer than a few months. Both are far too debilitating and, although I was mainly frying chips and feeding microwaves, the occasional order of mussels or steak, in the face of ten other orders, was impossible when you’d felt emboldened to piss in the street just hours earlier. At 19, work was an extension of school where adults were there to be mocked and the concept of doing something for someone else, after a lifetime of being served, was impossible to adapt to. Add in alcohol, a nightclub dance floor and a wage which was all disposable, and I wouldn’t have been useful as a cat sitter.
I know that this lifestyle is not normal for everyone at 19, and I know some people were closer to the earth’s atmosphere than I was. Nevertheless, I made the decision to turn York into my own Magaluf because I couldn’t take the world seriously. At that age, I couldn’t get a grip of anything as I had no reference point. Very few warning lights flashed up on the dashboard. Starting a fight with a bouncer who had dedicated to his life to gaining mass and violence is an utterly insane idea for an eleven-stone man; however, I needed to have my head pinned to the concrete to find out. In the same way, laughing at a Peter because he wanted me to grate a 5-kilogram block of cheese faster was the only reaction I could offer, as my empathy for his position, aspirations and the paying customer just didn’t mean anything. At that age, I could logically understand things, but I couldn’t feel what these things really meant as I’d just taken my school uniform off.
Therefore, in 2025, I do wonder how the Reform Party’s George Finch is feeling. He is the 19-year-old Leader of Warwickshire County Council, who, like myself, gained his promotion through strange circumstances (albeit his appointment has the potential to harm more people than the patrons of York’s David Lloyd). Beginning in the summer of 2025, Finch was made Deputy Leader by someone in the council who clearly wanted to grab a headline. After serving just two months in this role, the then Leader of the Council, Rob Howard, was forced to resign due to ill health. This led to a leadership crisis where the Conservative council members abstained from voting, leaving the Reform Council Chairman, Edward Harris, to cast the deciding vote. He decided that Finch, the boy who had just celebrated his 19th birthday, was ready to be put in control of £1.5 billion worth of assets, with authority over an annual budget of £500 million. Finch accepted his new position and kicked off his tenure as leader by doing two things. The first, was to tell the media that he wouldn’t be doing any interviews, nor would he answer their questions. As a man who struggled to speak to his friends’ parents at 19, I can completely empathise with this stance. Nevertheless, you’d hope for a little more from the leader of a council. For his second act, born from the same place as the first, he convinced the council to spend £150,000 on political advisers to help him to lead. Again, this is totally understandable for someone who was receiving pocket money a year ago but totally unprecedented in Warwickshire County Council’s history.
When I think of myself in the fridge of David Lloyd wolfing down a couple of secret sausages, quite a large part of me does think, ‘What the actual fuck?’, and to be fair to Finchy, he has compounded my ‘what the fuckery’. In his short time as leader, he has removed the rainbow flag from the council building during Pride month and addressed the Reform Party Conference with a well-researched claim that sixth-form education is a ‘complete joke’, and that it helps teenagers to develop a ‘woke mindset’. Most recently, he wrote to the Secretary of State for Education seeking permission to launch a review of the rules governing pupils’ eligibility for home-to-school transport in Warwickshire. He argued that he wanted more devolved powers in this area as it could save money for council. These powers were obviously not granted as it would mean that he could be given control over whether children as young as eight years old should walk up to 5 miles a day to and from school. He denies that this was his aim, as, in his words, he merely wanted ‘more devolved powers’.
Along with the fact that this person is grossly unqualified to lead, I am equally interested in what he must be thinking. Despite the fact that his actions will have real-world effects which, depending on what he’s received from £150,000 worth of advisers, will either work or won’t, I do sit here and chuckle at the state of affairs. In his interviews, he reveals very little as he avoids a discussion of detail and defaults to parroting a blend of political and management clichés. Although this is frustrating, I do marvel at the fact that a person who, until relatively recently, was being tucked in by his mum is being allowed to experiment with the real world outside the safety of the service industry. I wonder how he feels when he steps onto the nightclub floor, and whether the midweek session is anywhere in his mind. Or maybe I am now old enough to be a relic of a bygone era, and Gen Z are capable of far more than turning up to work hungover. I could well be making the arrogant mistake of underestimating someone because of my lack; however, when I really think about it, I don’t think I am. Even when I was pulling my colleagues chef trousers down as they tried to cook, I don’t think I would have made such obvious mistakes as being so proactively homophobic or anti-intellectual. I would also mind less if he could justify himself, but his confusion with his own ideas appears limitless. In his speech about education, he made the argument that lessons should have a more practical focus and subjects like engineering and D.T. should have greater prominence in the curriculum. However, when asked the career he would pursue if he weren’t a politician, he answered that he’d be a history teacher. Therefore, he would be working in a sector he has dismissed as a ‘joke’, and, if he taught the subject properly, he would definitely contribute to his version of a ‘woke mindset’, as he’d encourage his pupils to think.
Although I don’t want to bully a teenager, I think it’s clear this lad is an idiot and that his growing list of failures go beyond his inexperience. That being said, I do feel sorry for him in some ways. Whilst he may beat his chest to the thump of the far-right’s drum today, his age means he has been unable to develop a proper sense of the adult world, and he now finds himself in the spotlight of a movement which he may come to reject. The Reform Party has used Finch as a vessel to get their name into a newspaper column. More worryingly, they are also using him to push their mantra that the status quo is fundamentally flawed and poor behaviour is inconsequential. Why can’t a 19-year-old run a council? Why can’t we attach flags to lampposts? Why can’t Farage have been a bit racist or anti-Semitic as a kid? In essence, Finch is the collateral damage of Reform’s adoption of Trumpian politics. If you say enough controversial statements and support or commit enough controversial acts without recourse, people will become numb to controversy and adapt to an ever changing set of standards. Ultimately, this will provide Reform with more freedom if they gain power as people simply won’t be able to react to the volume of nonsense quick enough. I am sure Finch won’t see himself as a pawn and I am equally sure he will be puffed up by his own rise, viewing it as a product of the meritocratic, nondiscriminatory party he now represents. It probably won’t work out for him in the end, maybe it will, who knows? All I really know is that he would be better off in some backroom fridge with a sausage in his hand, thinking about when his next fag break will be.
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