I love clichés more than life itself. As any Tory should. You can't be a Conservative without revelling in clichés. It's not just that we use them so often (referring to our senior colleagues as big beasts, thinking its somehow profound to aver that political life can be disrupted by “events, dear boy, events” and objecting to difficult decisions being nudged “into the long grass”).

It's also the case that clichés are a very Tory concept. They embody the accumulated wisdom of past generations in a form that we can all understand, and even as they may seem a bit fusty to some, they continue to inspire unbudgeable affection among the silent majority. In that sense they're like other things Tories love - such as the King James Bible, the Royal Family, cooked breakfasts, thank-you letters, Ladybird books and Ann Widdecombe.

But much though I love clichés, there's one I want to avoid like the plague. The assertion that any innovation is the best thing since sliced bread. Not because I dislike innovations. Like those great conservative heroes, Prince Metternich and Lord Salisbury, I possess a childlike (can there be any other?) fascination for scientific advances. Steve Jobs is a household god in the Gove home.

No, I love innovation. It's sliced bread I hate.

Eating sliced bread is like dining on tinned pasta, wearing embroidered underwear or drinking wine with two sugars. It marks the unnecessary intrusion of someone else's debased idea of good taste into something that just shouldn't be mucked about with.

Sliced bread is flaccid when a proper loaf should be standing proud each morning. Sliced bread folds within seconds, like an inexperienced poker player in his first round of Texas hold 'em, when a proper loaf should be as firm, and crusty, as a belted earl telling a rambler to get orf his land.

I had recently begun to think that we, as a nation, had recoved our confidence in the value of good bread. The growth of the chains Le Pain Quotidien, Paul and Gail's appeared to signal a welcome commitment to proper baking. The presence of Poilâne and other equally exquisite sourdoughs in a wide range of supermarkets suggested that the long reign of the limply yeasty plastic slice was almost over.

But every so often it becomes tragically clear that progress is a matter of one loaf forward, two slices back. When journeying on Virgin's otherwise splendid West Coast Main Line train service last week I was crestfallen to discover that all there was on offer for the hungry traveller was limp grey ham in anaemic white bread or, alternatively, a smear of egg on a sliver of sausage, embedded between two white carpet tiles, calling itself an all-day breakfast. That is no more a breakfast than a glass of lime and soda is an aperitif.

There's no excuse for any decent catering outlet to offer sliced white on any occasion. It's nutritionally empty, fibre-free and when it lands on the tongue its as big a treat for the taste buds as a discarded medical swab. Following on from my Campaign for Real Aperitifs (and thank you all for your recipes for the perfect gin and French) I am thinking of launching a parallel Crusade Against Bogus Bread. We'll demand that hotel toast is cut to order from proper loaves, sandwiches use bread with unbleached, unprocessed, tasting-of-something flour and there's tax relief on sourdough. Sliced bread? It's the unkindest cut of all...

Hurd instinct

If you, like me, like your breakfast table to be dressed traditionally then you, like me, will be grateful to Penguin for its new publication, The Pleasures of English Food, by Alan Davidson. A choice series of carvings from Davidson's great joint of a book The Penguin Companion to Food, it provides rich pickings for the patriotic trencherman. And by praising him for his patriotism I don't mean to imply that Davidson was some sort of culinary equivalent of Al Murray's Pub Landlord, like Gregg Wallace and John Torode. of Masterchef. No, Davidson was a measured, passionate and persuasive champion of the neglected classics of English cooking, a diplomat and historian, a sort of Douglas Hurd of the dining table. His analysis of mutton's place in our diet, the virtues of Ayrshire bacon, the peculiarities of the Banbury cake and the indispensability of suet is compelling. It's as perfect in preparing you for dinner as a Tanqueray and tonic. Which is about the highest praise I can give.

First-class travel

Davidson's book is part of a series called English Journeys, which Penguin has produced and which includes Henry James on cathedrals and castles, extracts from Cobbett's Rural Rides, James Lees-Milne, Gertrude Jekyll, Vaughan-Williams's collected English Folk Songs and Edward Thomas's topographical prose. They are the perfect length for a train journey from the capital to one of the many underappreciated stretches of our countryside, such as west Northamptonshire or south Lincolnshire.

And an English journey like that is, in itself, the perfect way to spend any spare time you may have this Easter. Just ensure you bring your own sandwiches...

Michael Gove is Conservative MP for Surrey Heath

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