A TORY life peer who sits on the Lords committee that has blown over £260,000 on bubbly claimed yesterday that poor people are going hungry because they “don’t know how to cook.”

Baroness Anne Jenkin caused uproar during the launch of a parliamentary report into rising demand on foodbanks.

The baroness said: “We have lost our cooking skills. Poor people don’t know how to cook.”

Dishing out her own cost-cutting culinary tips to the stunned audience, she boasted: “I had a large bowl of porridge today, which cost 4p.

“A large bowl of sugary cereals will cost you 25p.”

A day earlier it came to light that the Lords’ refreshment committee on which the penny-pinching peer sits had jettisoned a plan to cut their bubbly budget for fear of getting a worse service.

Lords have spent £265,770 on 17,000 bottles of champagne since 2010 but — according to former Commons clerk Sir Malcolm Jack — the refreshment committee refused to merge catering with the MPs because it “feared that the quality of champagne would not be as good if they chose a joint service.”

Ms Jenkin and her unelected chums receive more than £1 million from the taxpayer every year to subsidise food and drink in the upper house.

The shamed Tory took to the airwaves immediately after the meeting to apologise.

“I am well aware that I made a mistake in saying it and apologise to anybody who’s been offended by it,” Ms Jenkin told Radio 4’s World at One programme.

But she went on to insist that her “point is valid,” saying: “What I meant was as a society we have lost our ability to cook.”

Labour MP Emma Lewell-Buck said her comments smacked of the Tories’ “us and them attitude.”

She told the Star: “How much more removed can you get from everyday reality and the lives that people are living in this country?

“They’re living in poverty and then you’ve got people like that who don’t want to drink cheaper champagne. It’s just disgusting.”

The South Shields MP worked alongside Ms Jenkin as part of a cross-party inquiry into hunger and food poverty in Britain.

They heard how the Trussell Trust’s 420 foodbanks provided emergency supplies to 913,138 people in the last year — compared to 128,697 in 2011/12.

And the inquiry’s Feeding Britain report found that delays in benefit payments and sanctions were to blame for soaring demand at foodbanks.

Ms Jenkin’s patronising of the poor was far from the first time a Tory had tried to absolve ministers’ responsibility for the upward trend.

Conservative chief whip Michael Gove suggested last September that families were going to foodbanks because they “can’t budget properly.”

Ms Lewell-Buck said though that her own experience showed that “if you can’t actually afford to buy the food then you can’t cook it.”

She said: “I didn’t exactly grow up with lots of wealth or lots of money.

“The problem wasn’t that my mam didn’t know how to cook. It was that because often there wasn’t enough money to buy plentiful amounts of food.”