LABOUR leader Ed Miliband has been moved to respond to what is being dubbed the “two kitchens media furore”. So it’s best to come clean: I also have two kitchens.

The first kitchen is the one we inherited on moving in, with modifications having been made since. Some cupboards have been removed and the original cooker has been replaced. A degree of prettifying has occurred.

The work surfaces are long past their best, but they do provide somewhere on which to knead bread and make coffee, two activities without which my life would be less tolerable. Much cooking fills this confined space, but you don’t need much room to cook.

Because, yes, it’s not exactly spacious. If you wanted to swing a cat, well, the cat might have something to say about that. There is certainly no space for cat-swinging if guests crowd in there, as guests often do.

There is much more room in kitchen number two. This is because a wall has been removed and a spanking extension built where the conservatory now stands. Everything in this kitchen is wide open and light floods in through the new glass roof. It’s just like the one I once saw on Grand Designs, although I couldn’t tell you which one. There is a lot of glass on that programme.

You see, as if I needed to spell it out, kitchen number two is the one I would like to have one day. You never know, perhaps one day I will.

Mr Miliband’s two kitchens are of a different order. He was pictured in one last week as part of a television interview with his wife, Justine, who is a barrister when she isn’t standing around in kitchens with her husband.

The Daily Mail, spotting a scandal of clearly stupendous proportions, first ran with a column by Sarah Vine, in which she lamented the dismal kitchen in which the Milibands were pictured, mugs of tea in hand. Another columnist, Jenni Russell, leapt to the Labour couple’s defence, pointing out that the low-key kitchen was in fact “a functional kitchenette” and “tea prep area”, while the main kitchen was much nicer.

All this led the Labour-goading Mail to mock “Two kitchens Miliband”, while the Sun claimed that Mr Miliband’s “attempts to paint himself as a man of the people” had collapsed because of his superfluity of kitchens.

In some ways, Ed Miliband only has himself to blame. If you invite the media into your house, you do expose yourself to ridicule.

What is it about politicians wishing to be seen in their kitchens? From around 2006 until after he became prime minister, David Cameron was always being filmed in his kitchen, washing up or making breakfast for the children.

For a while his kitchen became more familiar to me than ours. I often don’t know where to find things in our kitchen, but I could have told you where the Camerons stored the salt.

Are we supposed to be fooled by all this hanging around in kitchens? And why, while propped up against the fridge, do male political leaders still do that strange thing of parading their wives – and why do their wives agree to take part?

Justine Thornton, to use her professional name, is a barrister, so she should be wise to the dangers of such behaviour. During her television interview with the BBC, she said that attacks on her husband would become “really vicious” but that she was “up for a fight”. The fight came sooner than she perhaps thought, and partly because of her interview.

Wouldn’t it be better if our leaders kept their kitchens to themselves – and their partners, too, I’d suggest. On which parting note, Samantha Cameron said in a Red Nose interview: “I am proud of my husband all the time. It’s such a stressful job with a huge amount of responsibility and he does deal with it really well.”

And if you need to rush to either one of the kitchen sinks after reading that, you are excused.

• THAT alarm clock really has to go. The other night, and not for the first time, it went off at midnight instead of 6am, as arranged. Not helpful to someone with a post-bedtime degree in insomnia, with the twisted sheets and night-time wanderings to prove it.