James Brokenshire can talk his ovens down all he likes, but there will still be four of them, not two

“It’s never the crime, it’s always the cover up,” so goes an old saying that goes back to the Watergate hotel. But never before has the cover up involved seeking to partially obliterate the crime with a four-year old Victoria Sponge. And never before has the crime been that of having more significantly more ovens than the court of public opinion will allow.

We turn, in these rarefied hours in the life of the nation, to the open plan kitchen of Communities and Local Government Secretary James Brokenshire, and the four ovens hiding in plain sight therein. And we turn, more specifically, to Mr Brokenshire’s decision to have himself, his wife and his ovens photographed for the weekend’s newspapers.

Quite possibly, Mr Brokenshire is maneouvring for a Tory leadership bid. No one can know for sure, because not even those curious Chinese teenagers who can recite pi to 60,000 decimal places can be expected to recall the name of every Tory MP who is currently maneouvring for a leadership bid. It may simply be that Mr Brokenshire does not even know why he invited the media in to take pictures of his kitchen and its four ovens, beyond the fact that everybody else he knows is doing it so he thought he probably should.

Is it a crime to have four ovens? That is a question on which the different schools of political thought teach different lessons. The legal answer, is ‘no.’ But when the nanoscopically thin slice of the nation that spends its life on Twitter talking about things like James Brokenshire’s kitchen took a different view, Mr Brokenshire evidently thought he had a case to answer.

And so, we would come to learn, that James Brokenshire does not, actually, have four ovens, but “two double ovens.” Not since a man called Paul who works in PR for Scottish Rail, and who said last week that Scottish Rail does not “charge more for peak travel, but does offer a discount for non peak travel” has such a wondrous piece of spin been attempted. And moments later, it would lead us to the high point in the arc of the four ovens narrative, when Mr Brokenshire, an actual elected politician, would post a picture of himself, standing in front of four ovens, and type out the words “two ovens”, to describe the four ovens directly behind him.

Would it be disservice to the memory of George Orwell, to recall how “the party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.” He, after all, wrote of the struggle for survival under murderous totalitarian control. This, meanwhile, is a minor British cabinet minister, standing in front of his four ovens, and quite literally talking them down – from four to two.

Further sleuthing would come to reveal that the Victoria sponge pic in question is in fact four years old, intimating that another scandal had occurred. That scandal being that James Brokenshire had not, in fact, sprinted home from the House of Commons to bake an emergency sponge cake in desperate attempt to put out the four ovens fire. It would surely be more of a scandal had he done so.

Events, traditionally do not end well for a politician who invites the press into their kitchen. Dominic Raab did so just last week, only for his bizarre framed word cloud featuring “Parliament”, “Blackberry and Google”, “BBQ” and “Marketing” to become public knowledge, and Mr Raab become simultaneously blander yet weirder than he was already.

Ed Miliband was so upset by the reaction to his drab, austere, lifeless kitchen as featured in pre-2015 election interview that he rushed out a clarification that it wasn’t, actually, even his main kitchen, that was downstairs. This was just the upstairs kitchen. Mr Miliband, it turned out, literally didn’t know where his next meal was coming from. Reader, he did not win that election.

And then there was David Cameron, who was so very relaxed in his kitchen with the BBC’s James Landale at about the same time that he accidentally said he would stand down before the 2020 election, and so started the firing gun on the race to replace him, and so set in motion the events that would burn down his career, his party, and in time, his country.

Where exactly is Brokenshire’s place in kitchen cock up Valhalla? It is too early to say. On the plus side, he may reflect, had it not been for the four ovens, everyone would be talking about the two dishwashers instead.