John Gummer: Beef eater

1990: John Gummer with Cordelia munching burgers for the press

Probably the most derided politician to emerge out of the BSE scandal, John Gummer will always be remembered for making great public show of feeding his four-year-old daughter Cordelia a hamburger in the midst of the "mad cow" disease scare.

The press photographed Mr Gummer - then Agriculture Minister in the Conservative government - tucking into the burger with his little girl at a boat show in Suffolk on May 6 1990.

Just six days before, it had emerged a cat had died of a BSE-like disease and six months earlier the government itself had banned beef offal for human consumption.

Eight years passed - and 32 people had died of CJD, the human form of BSE - before Mr Gummer was obliged to justify his action to the public inquiry on BSE.

'Perfectly safe'

In December last year, he told the panel he had no regrets about his strenuous efforts to appease public fears with blanket statements that beef was "perfectly safe".

The ex-minister says he now eats more beef than ever

Families of CJD victims accused him and the government of whitewash. But Mr Gummer, a committed Christian and son of a well-known Church of England clergyman, insisted he always acted in the best interest of the consumer - using his own family as a benchmark.

"Adults, about themselves, may take a certain kind of risk," said the father of four. "They smoke and of all sorts of things. The only fair question, I think, before I made a comment to the public was that I thought this was safe for my children to eat."

Delayed ban on offal

He also told the inquiry he had delayed a ban on beef offal in 1989 because he did not believe it was "essential for public health" because the Southwood report on the issue had only suggested a ban.

At the end of the hearing, the panel asked him if the BSE crisis had changed his eating habits. He told them that if anything he ate more beef because it was cheaper that it used to be.

Down but not out

The burger episode turned him into a figure of fun and led to a lasting public mistrust of government pronouncement on food scares - notably Tony Blair's reassurances on genetically-modified food.

Yet Mr Gummer's political career remained unscathed.

The MP for Suffolk Coastal remained Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Food until 1993 when he was made Secretary of State for the Environment until Labour took power in 1997.

Now on the backbenches, he is regarded as one of the "greenest" Conservatives with strong views on on global warming and town planning.