Marx, The Almighty Gob, The Bacon Sarnie, and the Labour Leadership: Who Speaks for the Lumpenproletariat?
The Labour Leadership Contenders Have Specialist Subjects. I Just Wanted that Bacon Sarnie.
[Karl Marx, writing The Almighty Gob at three in the morning. Greggs bag. Bacon sarnie. Tomato ketchup in the beard. Some things transcend the centuries. Image: Gemini.]
I wonder if Karl Marx ever woke up at three in the morning, thinking about what he was going to write, with a craving for a bacon sarnie slathered in tomato ketchup. Quite possibly not, considering Greggs was still a few decades away. Not even so much as a sausage roll — which, in today’s terms, would probably be the daily bread of the very lumpenproletariat he was writing about.
Then again, a bacon sarnie would probably have been a step down for Marx. The man ate caviar and smoked fish on Friedrich Engels’ money while writing about the starving poor. Make of that what you will.
Although, had Greggs been around in his day, one suspects Marx would have had something to say about the vegan sausage roll. Probably several volumes.
It’s the kind of thing that keeps me awake in the small hours. That, and an unsatisfied craving for a bacon sarnie.
You know that feeling — brain still running, body demanding something completely unreasonable.
Because I did, last night — stomach gurgling, wide awake, nowhere open. The craving was specific, fully formed, and entirely non-negotiable. It also went completely unmet.
Which, now I think about it, is a reasonable working definition of the lumpenproletariat — and a reasonable description of what most of the country feels watching the Labour leadership crisis unfold in May 2026.
Marx had a problem with the lumpenproletariat — his word, first deployed in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, for the people at the very bottom, not the working class but below that: the chronically unemployed, the vagrants, the people outside any formal structure, outside class consciousness, outside the revolutionary project entirely. You might include me in that. If you were minded to do so.
He called them the social scum. Unreliable. Easily bought — his words, not mine. I’ll leave you to decide which category I fall into.
He wasn’t wrong about the category. He was wrong about the people in it.
Think about that for a second.
Because the lumpenproletariat, in 2026, isn’t a fringe condition. It’s the general public. The people — maybe you — who go to work, or don’t, who pay their taxes, or struggle to, who watch the news with a creeping sense that none of it is actually for them.
The people who, when the night runs long, want something simple that no one is providing.
That’s not fringe — that’s, at the very least, some of the country.
Meanwhile. Most of the country, right now, is watching a group of people preparing to audition for Prime Minister with the intensity of contestants on Mastermind.
Two rounds — specialist subject, which is the thing you know better than anyone, and general knowledge, which is everything else — the chair, the questions, the clock.
Imagine the Labour leadership field seated, one by one, under the lights — you’ve seen the show, you know how this goes.
Andy Burnham. Specialist subject: Greater Manchester Devolution, 2017 to Present, With Particular Reference to His Own Role In It. He’s currently the most popular Labour politician in the country — 34% positive rating against Starmer’s 23%, according to YouGov’s May 2026 tracker.
Josh Simons resigned his Makerfield seat yesterday to trigger a by-election so Burnham can come back — assuming he wins it.
That is not a political story. That is a choreographed drama in which everyone has already read the script except the public.
Wes Streeting. Specialist subject: NHS Waiting Times Reductions And The Art Of Resigning At Precisely The Right Moment. He quit as Health Secretary on Thursday, his resignation letter noting the NHS had just hit its interim target — sixty-five percent of patients treated within eighteen weeks, the biggest cut in waiting lists in seventeen years.
He announced his achievements. Then he handed in his notice. The timing was, you’d have to say, surgical.
Streeting wrote: where we need vision, we have a vacuum. Where we need direction, we have drift. That’s a line. That’s a well-prepared line.
Ed Miliband. Specialist subject: Renewable Energy Frameworks of the North Sea, With A Side Note On Things That Happened In 2015 That We Don’t Need To Revisit. He’s the soft-left candidate if Burnham can’t get back into Parliament in time. He knows how to pull levers. Someone said so.
He is also the man who, twelve years ago, couldn’t eat a bacon sandwich on camera without it becoming a national crisis.
The universe has a sense of humour. At least.
Angela Rayner. Specialist subject: Being More Relatable Than Everyone Else In The Room While Remaining In The Room. She’s authentic, they say. Popular with backbenchers and members.
According to Tony Travers, a professor of politics at the London School of Economics who has tracked these ratings closely, most people in Britain find her more relatable than most politicians. Which is a sentence that tells you everything about most politicians.
Rachel Reeves. Specialist subject: Rachel Reeves.
You’ve watched this before — different names, same chairs, same distance.
None of them, placed in the Mastermind chair, could answer the general knowledge round. Not the actual one. The one that matters. The one that arrives about three o’clock in the morning.
You see, here is the general knowledge round nobody in that room could answer.
What does it cost to heat a house this winter on a fixed income? Not the policy. The number. The actual number someone is looking at on an actual bill.
What happens in a town where the last GP surgery closed, the nearest one is eleven miles away, you don’t drive, and your guide dog — a greyhound, as it happens — would even struggle with that much exercise in one day?
What does it feel like to be in a job that pays enough to disqualify you from benefits but not enough to feel safe?
What do you want at three in the morning when there’s nowhere open and the thing you need is the simplest thing in the world?
You just answered at least one of those. Didn’t you.
None of them know. Not because they’re stupid — some of them are genuinely impressive people in the right room. But the right room stopped being this country a long time ago.
They’ve been in the building so long — the parliament, the shadow cabinet, the special adviser’s office, the think tank, the panel, the selection meeting — that the building has become the world. Westminster isn’t a place they work. It’s the reality they inhabit. Everything outside it is abstract. Data. Constituencies. Polling.
The lumpenproletariat — the people politics performs at, talks at, governs at — rather than for — doesn’t register as people. It registers as a problem to solve, a number to move, a message to land.
Marx thought the lumpenproletariat were below politics. The Labour leadership thinks they’re beside the point. The result looks the same from the outside.
And, by the way. Frantz Fanon — an Algerian writer who understood what it meant to be on the wrong end of a system that didn’t see you — disagreed with Marx. In The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon argued that the dispossessed, the ones with nothing left to protect, were the most revolutionary force of all.
Not despite their exclusion — because of it, nothing to lose, nothing to conserve, no stake in the existing order.
Which is one way of explaining why, last Thursday, across England, Scotland and Wales, enough people voted for Nigel Farage’s Reform UK to send a message nobody in Westminster can ignore.
Not because they believe in Farage — some of them, perhaps — but mostly because they knew, and maybe you knew it too, that the existing order was not for them, and they reached for the most emphatic available rejection of it.
“Where we need vision, we have a vacuum” — Streeting wrote that about Starmer. The public has been saying it about all of them for considerably longer. James Dyson probably said the same once. That’s another story, and, one clearly more successful in many ways.’
The race to replace Starmer is already being framed — their words — as a battle of ideas between Burnham and Streeting, left versus centre, vision versus drift.
Nobody is asking whether any of these visions will include the person at three in the morning who just wanted a bacon sarnie and couldn’t get one. That person isn’t hard to find — it’s some of the country, at least. Me included.
The question isn’t who leads the Labour Party. The question is whether the Labour Party, under any of these candidates, will remember that the lumpenproletariat has a stomach. Mostly, for them.
The sarnie never materialised, so I made tea instead and sat with the silence and the craving that wouldn’t leave.
You see. Here’s the thing about hunger at three in the morning. It doesn’t want a strategy document. It doesn’t want a vision for Britain. It doesn’t want a Mastermind champion installed in the big chair at Number Ten.
It wants something warm. Something simple. Something that says: yes, you exist, yes your need is real, yes it can be met. Simple really.
That’s not a manifesto — it doesn’t need to be — it’s the thing politics keeps forgetting to do. The small things in life that mean a great deal to a lot of people.
And you’ve known that for a long time. Haven’t you.
It was somewhere, in a London lodging house, in the small hours of the nineteenth century, Karl Marx put down his pen, pushed back from the manuscript, and felt exactly the same way. He just couldn’t do anything about it either.
The building is still there. The ground floor is Quo Vadis now — an expensive restaurant, rich clientele.
Oh, and by the way. When they put the blue plaque up in 1967 the owner complained about it, said his customers were the very best, rich people. Marx spent five years in that building theorising about exactly those people.
The plaque stayed. So did the restaurant. Draw your own conclusions.
Nowadays, of course, there’s a Greggs four minutes away on Golden Square, where Marx couldn’t get a sausage roll back then. You can. Whether that counts as progress is entirely up to you. Just give it Marx out of ten on that one.
Postscript: Unlike Marx, who found Greggs was several decades away, I found it was merely several hours away. It was eleven twenty-seven this morning. The sarnie, when it finally arrived, was everything it needed to be. Slathered in tomato ketchup.
The Almighty Gob covers politics, power, and the gap between what institutions say and what they actually do — which, it turns out, is quite a gap. Over 500 pieces in under two years, which makes this Bristol’s most prolific blog. If you’ve ever felt that something isn’t adding up, you’re probably right. The writing is satirical, but every word is grounded in absolute, verified fact. Neurodivergent, awake at 2 or 3 in the morning, noticing the parts of life others walk past and being more honest about them. Over 88 Bristol FOI investigations. Independent candidate. The record speaks for itself. You know where to go. PS. Hell is not an option.
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Sources and Further Reading.
For those who want to go deeper, check the working, or push back on anything here — here’s where it all comes from.
On the Labour leadership crisis
YouGov Political Favourability Ratings, May 2026 — Andy Burnham 34% positive, Keir Starmer 23% positive, published 15 May 2026: https://yougov.com/en-gb/articles/54772-political-favourability-ratings-may-2026
Tony Travers, Professor of Politics, London School of Economics — quoted on Angela Rayner’s relatability ratings, via Time Magazine: https://time.com/article/2026/05/12/who-could-replace-keir-starmer-as-prime-minister-uk-contenders/
Wes Streeting resignation letter to Keir Starmer, 14 May 2026 — full text published by ITV News: https://www.itv.com/news/2026-05-14/in-full-wes-streetings-resignation-letter-to-pm-keir-starmer
Josh Simons MP resignation statement triggering Makerfield by-election, 14 May 2026 — reported by Al Jazeera: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/5/14/uk-health-secretary-wes-streeting-resigns-from-government
Wikipedia: 2026 United Kingdom Government Crisis — live article updated 15 May 2026: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_United_Kingdom_government_crisis
Ipsos Political Pulse, conducted 8–12 May 2026, published in conjunction with ITV/Peston: https://www.ipsos.com/en-uk/two-three-britons-66-think-starmer-should-not-lead-labour-next-general-election-are-divided-when-he
NHS England waiting times interim target — 65% of patients treated within 18 weeks by March 2026, announced by Streeting hours before his resignation, reported by CNN: https://edition.cnn.com/2026/05/14/uk/streeting-resigns-health-secretary-starmer-uk-intl
On Ed Miliband and the bacon sandwich
Wikipedia: Ed Miliband bacon sandwich photograph — photograph taken 21 May 2014, became national story through 2014–15 election campaign: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_Miliband_bacon_sandwich_photograph
On Karl Marx in London
English Heritage: Karl Marx — the London Connections — Marx lived at 28 Dean Street, Soho 1850–1856, began Das Kapital during this period: https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/inspire-me/blog/blog-posts/karl-marx-london-connections
New York Public Library: Karl Marx’s notes for Das Kapital — first volume published 1867, largely composed in the reading room of the British Museum: https://www.nypl.org/events/exhibitions/galleries/beginnings/item/3560
Wikipedia: Karl Marx diet and health — Marx was fond of highly seasoned dishes, smoked fish, caviar and pickled cucumbers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Marx
Wikipedia: Quo Vadis restaurant — occupies 26–29 Dean Street including the building where Marx lived: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quo_Vadis_(restaurant)
On Greggs
Greggs Foundation History — founded 1939 as a door-to-door bakery round in Newcastle, first shop opened 1951: https://www.greggsfoundation.org.uk/about/history
Nearest Greggs to 28 Dean Street — Golden Square, Soho, approximately four minutes walk: https://www.greggs.com/shop-finder
Primary theoretical texts
Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852) — original formulation of the lumpenproletariat as political category
Karl Marx, Das Kapital, Volume 1 (1867) — the work Marx was composing in his London lodgings
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (1961) — Fanon’s inversion of Marx’s assessment, arguing the dispossessed as revolutionary force