Jack Monroe

My relationship with energy bills has changed throughout my life: from topping up my energy meter and writing down how much it cost to run a bath, boil the kettle, and make a curry, to scrutinising every email and letter from the many suppliers I’ve used over the years. One thing remains the same: despite being a writer for a living with tens of thousands of words at my disposal, I have struggled to connect with some of the language used in energy bills. And because of this, I sometimes don’t fully understand exactly what I’m paying for, and why.

The food writer and anti-poverty campaigner Jack Monroe has revealed how she had a breakdown because of the stress of juggling childcare with being a working parent. Ms Monroe, who was instrumental in piling pressure on the Government to take action over extending free school meals during the pandemic, said that after she returned to her job from maternity leave it was “extraordinarily stressful” to organise childcare arrangements and the situation became “unsustainable”.

I’m renting a beautiful dormer bungalow in Southend, where I live with my son Jonny. When I looked around it, I walked in and, as soon as I saw the kitchen, I told the agent I’d take it. I’ve moved house more than 20 times in my short lifetime, and most places I’ve lived haven’t had gardens. In a lot of rentals you’re not allowed to even put a nail in the wall, but my landlady is lovely. It’s the first home I’ve been allowed to wallpaper and put up shelves. It’s been a long time coming.

Over a decade ago, I was a regular reader of Vogue. I had a steady, well-paid job for someone who had left school with too few GCSEs to pursue A Levels, I was saving my wages for a deposit on a flat, and I had a more than passing interest in looking at beautiful clothes and beautiful things. I am a visually stimulated and creative person, and even though the contents of the pages were beyond my Fire Service salary most of the time, I still enjoyed the faraway lands of aspiration and daydreams offered up in the mess room on my breaks. I had no idea then that my carefully woven rug of chances and circumstances would be pulled out from under me, and that I would be plunged into hunger, poverty, and endless, aching cold. Nor that 10 years later I would be writing about it for that very same title I once pored over.

The cook and campaigner barely slept last week as the row raged over inadequate food parcels for kids. She discusses austerity, cronyism and why she’ll never stop fighting. I speak to Jack Monroe, cook, author and campaigner, towards the end of a tumultuous week in food poverty. On Monday, a Twitter user, @roadsidemum, posted a photo of a “hamper” she said was intended to replace her child’s free school lunches for two weeks. The provider, Chartwells, claimed it covered one week and was funded at £10.50. The contents wouldn’t have cost you £6 in any supermarket. Parents all over the country shared similar photos, food nothing short of contemptuous: half a red pepper, a quarter of an onion. What kind of company would employ someone to make sure no family gets too much onion? Monroe has been sent similar photos since March – the packages sent to shielding people, outsourced by the government to other companies, were similarly unimpressive, though “they got a couple of tins of pork as well. Every time I tried to make a noise about it, it was just like shouting in the wind.”