How do you like your eggs? Fried? Scrabbled? Or splattered on the face of a politician? For years, for decades, for centuries, protesters have reached for food when they’re angry at public figures, usually eggs but anything will do really. The question is: with Nigel Farage coming under fire twice in the last few days, are lefties turning the election nasty?

It's a fair question because on the face of it, food and drink appears to be a weapon of choice more often for people on the left rather than for people on the right. Almost every Tory Prime Minister has had an egg thrown at them at some point, and perhaps surprisingly, the best response came from Margaret Thatcher. “What a terrible waste of eggs,” she is said to have remarked, which is both a Thatcherite attempt at a joke, I think, but also a nice little glimpse into her essentially thrifty and sensible philosophy.

But let’s look at what’s happened to Mr Farage shall we, because as I say there have been two incidents in the last few days. The first happened in Clacton when the Reform leader announced his candidacy and a woman, Victoria Thomas Bowen, chucked a milkshake in his face. It later emerged Ms Bowen’s motives may have had more to do with her Onlyfans account that it did with politics but, consciously or not, she was tapping into a form of protest, the milkshake, that became a popular target against the right and far-right. Mr Farage himself has been a victim of it before.

The second incident involving the Reform leader happened on Tuesday while he was waving at the people of Barnsley from the top of a bus. A man in a hoodie was seen shouting at him from a construction site before throwing a cup (I hope it was a cup of tea; could protest get more British?) He then threw something else from a bucket. Both the woman with the milkshake and the man with the cup have been charged.

Some of the initial reaction to all of this is interesting. At first, Mr Farage appeared to make light of the milkshake incident, posing happily with milkshakes on a tray. But after the incident in Barnsley, he said he wouldn’t let attacks stop him campaigning and that he would “not surrender to the mob”. The Home Office offered him extra security.

Other politicians also weighed in. The former Tory minister Robert Jenrick said the milkshake incident was clearly a criminal offence and there "can be no place for this kind of behaviour". Labour’s Yvette Cooper also called the attack disgraceful and home secretary James Cleverly said of the Barnsley incident: “There must be no place for violence and intimidation in our politics and these actions should be condemned by everyone.”

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On the face of it, that sort of reaction is fair enough: being hit with eggs or milkshakes or whatever is unpleasant and things can get out of hand. I mentioned eggs being thrown at Mrs Thatcher: it happened in 1981 while she was visiting factories in Scotland and when the food started flying in Renfrew and the crowd was pushing forward, the PM’s security team was itchy about whether they’d get out unscathed. Reading interviews with the security guys, it sounds pretty hairy, although Mrs Thatcher remained characteristically calm.

As well as the potential threat to safety though, there’s another offshoot of the food-as-protest thing which is troubling in a different way, or bewildering might be a better word. This is the recent trend for throwing food at objects rather than people. It happened in Glasgow when porridge was poured over the bust of Queen Victoria at Kelvingrove and soup was sprayed on the statue of her in George Square. Then there was soup on van Gogh’s Sunflowers and more soup on the Mona Lisa (tomato in the first case and pumpkin in the second, in case you’re interested)

The apparent motivation for all this stuff is anger at the use of fossil fuels, but it’s hard to get your head round. For a start, if the aim is to attract publicity, it attracts the wrong sort (most people think they’re idiots). There’s also something unpleasantly entitled and ugly about attacking art and the products of talent, genius or hard work. Are they protesters or philistines? And if the people watching don’t understand what your point is, why bother?

As for the eggs and milkshakes aimed at politicians, I find it harder to get worked up. For a start, I think the aim isn’t violence as such, it’s humiliation; the aim is to turn someone important and powerful (and that’s more often than not a Tory) into someone who looks ridiculous; the point they’re trying to make, consciously or not, is that we don’t respect you and don’t think you should be in your position of power so splat.

The other thing to bear in mind is it has always happened. It’s said that Romans got so fed up with governor Vespasian they pelted him with turnips. But countless politicians have faced it too, including Churchill (eggs), Wilson (also eggs), Blair (flour) and Mandelson (custard). Get them all together and you could make a nice cake (I thank you for your laughter).

And does food as protest really achieve anything anyway? You’ll probably get arrested, you’ll probably have to pay the dry-cleaning bill and if your target is John Prescott, you’ll probably get a punch in the gob as well. And in the end you’re unlikely to have persuaded anyone. So what I say to the chuckers and the throwers and the splatters is: don’t throw your soup at a work of art, have it for your lunch instead. As for the eggs, keep them, make something nice, and wait for change.