‘It’s only my second time in here,” laughs Victoria Collins, the new Liberal Democrat MP for Harpenden and Berkhamsted, as she nibbles a chocolate-chip muffin in her local branch of the upmarket bakery chain Gail’s.
“There are a lot of other great coffee shops apart from Gail’s,” she is keen to stress. But she is here today, on a summer morning on Berkhamsted High Street, because as well as selling fancy pastries, the rapidly-expanding chain has become an unlikely political bellwether. The Lib Dems surged to their best-ever general election result in July by ruthlessly targeting Conservative constituencies. And one rule of thumb the party used for identifying areas where voters might be ready to ditch the Tories was this: “Does it have a Gail’s?”
The chain is also at the heart of local protests, including a particularly heated one in Walthamstow, east London, where a petition to stop a Gail’s opening, signed by hundreds of residents, says keeping out the bakery is about “safeguarding the soul of a beloved neighbourhood”. As the chain prepared to open a new branch in Brighton earlier this year, local newspaper the Argus reported that the word “boring” was spray-painted on the building (along with a large image of a penis).
So why has something as mundane as a bakery become such a hot topic?
For the uninitiated, Gail’s is a rapidly expanding chain of fancy coffee shops, loved by well-to-do foodies for its croissants and cinnamon buns and loathed by detractors who say it is a bland corporate enterprise that shunts local businesses out. A loaf of Gail’s sourdough can set you back almost a fiver; a regular cappuccino, more than £4. The bakery now has 130 branches in England, often housed in historic buildings, where the decor is blond wood and exposed brickwork. Don’t be fooled by the “neighbourhood” feel of a Gail’s – this is a careful construct. The chain is majority-owned by the US private equity group Bain Capital, and its folksy brown paper packaging conceived by a design studio, after “in-depth brand strategy and positioning work” to make it feel “authentic” and “local”.
Gail’s longstanding chairperson is the outspoken serial entrepreneur Luke Johnson, responsible for the now ubiquitous Pizza Express and the now defunct Patisserie Valerie. He has overseen much of the bakery’s expansion and its sale to Bain Capital in 2021 (although he still holds a significant stake in Bread Holdings, Gail’s parent company, reported at the time to be 15%). Johnson was pro-Brexit, a vehement critic of Covid lockdowns and has repeatedly attacked policies aimed at tackling the climate emergency. “NetZero stupidity is destroying industry and living standards in UK,” he tweeted last month – politics that are a very long way from that of the Lib Dems, but also areas such as Brighton and Walthamstow (Green and Labour respectively).
Many of the residents’ comments under the petition against Gail’s in Walthamstow cite Johnson’s politics as a reason to boycott the chain. When the campaigning leftwing barrister Jolyon Maugham spotted the connection between Johnson and Gail’s, he called on X for a boycott of the chain, even offering sourdough starter to followers struggling to wean themselves off their fix of fancy bread.
Despite some local objection, the bakery’s red and cream signage has become a crude shorthand for a certain kind of comfortable affluence. (“Waitrose woman” was another demographic the Lib Dems had their eye on. Waitrose, as it happens, stocks Gail’s bread). Places with a Gail’s, says a Lib Dem strategist, “are traditional Conservative places. And that’s where we took the fight to and that’s where we won against them, absolutely comprehensively.”
Middle-class areas in the home counties went almost unnoticed in the 2017 and 2019 general elections, when the much-analysed battlegrounds were in Labour’s “red wall” of seats across the former industrial heartlands of northern England. But as the Economist put it in a recent piece, which highlighted the Lib Dem-Gail’s nexus, “the new front line of British politics is just lovely”.
Like all rules of thumb, the Lib Dems’ use of Gail’s as a political indicator was an approximation. In London, many high streets with Gail’s branches, including the very first in chichi Hampstead, are in Labour constituencies. The branch in Clifton, Bristol, sits in one of the Greens’ four seats, while the Lib Dems’ success stretched far into the south-west of England, beyond the bakery’s reach.
But there are 13 constituencies in the south of England where there is at least one branch of Gail’s and in which the Lib Dems ousted the Conservatives on 4 July. Many had been Tory for decades – including Henley and Tunbridge Wells, as well as David Cameron’s former seat of Witney, and Esher and Walton, where Dominic Raab stood down rather than risk defeat. In late July, a Gail’s branch opened in Newbury – another Lib Dem gain from the Tories.
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Gail’s was founded by an Israeli baker, Gail Mejia, in the 1990s, initially as a wholesale bakery in Hendon, supplying London’s restaurants. The site still exists and is described as its “mother” bakery. Among its specialities is challah, the traditional Jewish celebration bread that flies off the shelves of many neighbourhood bakeries in and around Hendon.
Long-time chief executive, and co-founder of Gail’s cafes, Tom Molnar, who skateboards to work in north London, got involved in 2003, when he and fellow McKinsey consultant Ran Avidan bought half the company, with a view to helping to fund its expansion.
Two years later, the first cafe branch opened in Hampstead. Since then, the chain’s rise has been aided by the blossoming of a foodie culture that has increasingly seen consumers willing to pay extra for products they perceive as hand-made and good quality.
“I think it’s super positive,” Molnar says about what he sees as a generational shift towards caring more about the quality of what we eat. “My kids, they’re half Italian, but they grew up here, and they just care about food far more than they care about beer or going out.”
Ramsey Baghdadi, a consumer analyst at the consultancy GlobalData, attributes Gail’s success to younger customers. “Despite the cost of living crisis, gen Z UK consumers are still willing to pay for high-quality coffee and bakery goods,” he says, pointing to a recent survey his firm carried out, which suggested 32% of these younger consumers (born in the 1990s and early 2000s) admitted to “high” or “very high” spending on food and drink in coffee and tea shops.
But Molnar says the main thing he looks for when deciding where to site a new outlet is thriving neighbourhoods with plenty of families. “If they have a farmer’s market it’s a great thing; if they have schools that’s a great thing: I want to go where people are engaged. They’re societies. They’re communities,” he says.
Asked whether he has a typical customer in mind (whether Lib Dem or not), he says, “No. My customer is somebody who cares about food.” He will concede that they tend to be “at least average and above” in terms of income, but insists: “If there’s a strong community, I put a Gail’s. And I don’t think it matters how wealthy they are.”
Here in Harpenden and Berkhamsted (which has two branches), Collins stresses that not all her constituents are affluent. “Yes, there are elements that might seem like the veneer of the commuter town, but it is a real mix and you’ve still got areas of deprivation – families in need.”
But she says the Lib Dems’ message about the importance of care, highlighted by the party’s leader, Ed Davey, through his personal story of supporting his disabled son, resonated with voters across income groups, exasperated at the state of public services.
Tim Bale, a professor of politics at Queen Mary, University of London, and an expert on the Conservative party, says the Tories’ lurch to the political right has also alienated many of its former supporters in middle England seats like these.
“I think it’s because the rhetoric that they’ve been spouting, really since Brexit and in some cases before Brexit, is just so off-putting. It’s so hardline, and frankly obsessive and weird to many of those voters,” he said. “These voters are socially pretty liberal, even if they’re economically pretty conservative, and the stuff that Rishi Sunak and some of his colleagues were coming out with just doesn’t resonate with their values. It doesn’t chime with the way they see Britain or the way they want Britain to go.”
Sophie Stowers, an elections expert at the research group UK in a Changing Europe, says she studied the constituencies Davey visited on his stunt-rich campaign tour – which included many of these Gail’s seats.
“When you look at the demographics of it, these places are very affluent … They’re not places that are struggling.”
She argues that the swing against Sunak’s party in constituencies like these was not just about values, but competence. “A big part of the rejection of the Tories was just built on a perception of incompetence, and I think for this group of voters, the idea of having pride in your government, having a statesman in charge, that’s quite important.”
“Some Labour voters may have seen it as, ‘It’s one rule for us, another rule for them.’ These voters were seeing it as, ‘We’re a laughing stock on the international stage,’” she adds.
Collins says she hopes to pursue a different kind of politics at Westminster. “I really feel that the Lib Dems are very much about community politics,” she says. “You’re truly listening to the issues that matter, and you’re acting on those in line with your values.”
There is a common thread here with Molnar’s stress on communities and their individual character: he says his team at Gail’s always tries to find the history of the buildings they are moving into, for example. “We should have a purpose beyond food: to make that neighbourhood a bit better. If I can take a place that’s been abandoned for three years, awesome.”
Gail’s plans to open 35 more branches nationwide this year, spreading identikit artisan pastries deeper into the home counties and beyond. “I think you have two choices: either you decide you’re going to stop, and then you’re in protective mode; or you’re in expansive mode,” says Molnar. “Hey, if more people could have Gail’s rather than Greggs or Gail’s rather than McDonalds or Gail’s rather than Pret, why wouldn’t you do it? Well, you wouldn’t do it because you couldn’t deliver the same level of quality.” He insists the chain will continue to expand, “sensibly”.
Back in Berkhamsted, Collins pops the rest of her muffin in a paper bag for the train journey down to Westminster, with a nod to nearby independent alternatives to Gail’s. “In this seat, we have so many great local businesses. And coming back to that community thing, the real point is, people love to support their local businesses,” she says.
As the defeated Conservatives drag out their leadership contest through the summer, Bale says they would be wise to remember voters in Gail’s sourdough-munching stomping grounds like this one, as well as those lost to Labour or tempted by Reform.
“I think values had quite a lot to do with it, when it comes to these voters,” he says. “But it strikes me, if you look at the trajectory of the party over the past few years, they’re going to travel further down that road to Reform – which would put those voters off, possibly for life.”
• This article was amended on 24 August 2024. An earlier version included Lewes among constituencies that had been Conservative “for decades” until July’s general election. In fact Lewes previously had a Liberal Democrat MP between 1997 and 2015.
