Jamie and his chickens

Having stopped our kids eating junk food so successfully (well at least he tried), you’d have to have been  on the moon for the last few weeks to have missed Jamie Oliver’s latest crusade on behalf of poor old  British chickens.I’m all into animal welfare and felt a sense of duty to sit through his ‘lecture’ on TV last Friday, even  though I found the whole thing really quite patronising and nearly as long as the Lord of the Rings trilogy.From a PR perspective Waitrose, as always, and more surprisingly, the Co-op came out of the programme really well, whilst the likes of Asda and Tesco were portrayed as the big bad wolf. Then there was the uncomfortable issue of Jamie being a representative of Sainsburys which was never really dealt with properly.I remember thinking to myself as the show drew to a close … “Oh Mr Oliver, you’re lining yourself up for a fall. The press will be sharpening their knives right now.  If there’s one thing the love more than Princess Diana, Amy Winehouse, Britney Spears and Pete Doherty, it’s trying to tip a smug do-gooder off his pedestal. I’ll give it a matter of months before I see some sort of ‘Jamie gets egg on his face’ headline.”Turns out my prediction was way too conservative. Sat in the local cafe this lunchtime, chomping down a fry up (come to think of it probably not made with free-range eggs), low and behold I see an article in the Sun about Jamie’s ‘Fifteen’ restaurant in Cornwall being found using battery eggs.The article is a bit unfair, as it’s hardly likely that Jamie himself personally made the order, but I’ll bet the restaurant manager who ordered the eggs when their usual supplier of free range eggs missed a delivery, is already in the dole queue. Talk about bad timing!!!