You are currently browsing the tag archive for the ‘Gordon Ramsay’ tag.
Matt Hancock looms large in The Telegraph‘s Lockdown Files series which ended earlier this month.
For more background, see parts 1 and 2.
Matt Hancock latest
The series continues after an update on latest news about the UK’s former Health and Social Care Secretary.
On Saturday, March 25, 2023, The Guardian reported that Hancock had been one of a handful of Conservative MPs caught in a prank set up by the left-wing activist group Led By Donkeys, ‘Top Tory MPs ask for £10,000 a day to work for fake Korean company’ (emphases mine):
The former chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, and former health secretary, Matt Hancock, agreed to work for £10,000 a day to further the interests of a fake South Korean firm after apparently being duped by the campaign group Led by Donkeys.
Kwarteng attended a preliminary meeting at his parliamentary office and agreed in principle to be paid the daily rate after saying he did not require a “king’s ransom”. When Hancock was asked his daily rate, he responded: “It’s 10,000 sterling” …
The senior politicians have complied with all relevant rules and referred to their obligation to their constituents during preliminary meetings. The Led by Donkeys project, conducted with investigative reporter Antony Barnett, comes at a time when people face a cost of living crisis. The campaign group released a report on its investigation on Twitter on Saturday, with recorded undercover footage …
The purported firm that approached the politicians did not exist and had a rudimentary foreign website with fake testimonials. MPs have been warned by the Home Office to be on their guard against the “threat of foreign interference”, and the group’s investigation demonstrated the ease with which they seemed able to gain access to the MPs.
Led by Donkeys is understood to have approached 20 MPs from the Conservative party, Labour and Liberal Democrats after examining the outside earnings of MPs on the parliamentary register of interests. An email sent by the fake investment and consulting firm, Hanseong Consulting, said it wanted individuals for an international advisory board to “help our clients navigate the shifting political, regulatory and legislative frameworks” in the UK and Europe.
It said advisers would be required to attend six board meetings a year, with a “very attractive” remuneration package and “generous expenses” for international travel. Five MPs agreed to be interviewed on Zoom, with one who was clearly suspicious of the firm’s credentials terminating the call. The MPs were interviewed by a woman purporting to be a senior executive, with a backdrop of the skyline of Seoul, the South Korean capital, at her office window …
In early March, Hancock agreed to an online meeting for the advisory role. The Telegraph had that week published his leaked cache of more than 100,000 WhatsApp messages, but he seemed relaxed for the meeting with the fake foreign firm. He said it had been “quite a busy week” but that March was the “start of hope”.
“We were wondering, do you have a daily rate at the moment?” he was asked by the interviewer, posing as a senior business executive. “I do, yes,” Hancock replied. “It’s 10,000 sterling.”
… Hancock is an independent MP after he had the whip suspended for taking part in I’m a Celebrity, for which he was paid £320,000, with Rishi Sunak’s spokesperson saying at the time that “MPs should be working hard for their constituents”.
Hancock said in the meeting that he followed the “spirit and letter” of parliamentary rules, and would also require additional approval for the role because he had been a minister, but outside interests were permitted. He said he was mindful of the responsibility to serve his constituents …
Led by Donkeys was established in 2018 as a campaign in response to Brexit. Its high-profile projects and satirical stunts have since included a spoof episode of the BBC show Line of Duty with Boris Johnson being interrogated by the anti-corruption AC-12 unit and painting the colours of the Ukrainian flag outside the Russian embassy in London.
A spokesperson for Hancock said: “The accusation appears to be that Matt acted entirely properly and within the rules, which had just been unanimously adopted by parliament. It’s absurd to bring Mr Hancock into this story through the illegal publication of a private conversation. All the video shows is Matt acting completely properly.”
Furthermore, Matt will be looking for a new job as he will not be standing again as an MP come the next general election.
Although I am not a defender of Hancock, former BBC presenter Jon Sopel is hardly in a position to take pot shots at him, considering that he, too, fancies filthy lucre, as Guido Fawkes revealed on Monday, March 27:
Days earlier, on March 18, The Mail‘s Richard Eden reported that Hancock’s girlfriend and her estranged husband sold their South London house to Gordon Ramsay for several million pounds:
Should she ever tire of turning her boyfriend, Matt Hancock, into a TV star, Gina Coladangelo has a lucrative alternative career as a property tycoon.
I can disclose that she and her estranged husband, Oliver Tress, managed to sell their marital home to fiery TV chef Gordon Ramsay and his wife, Tana, for a staggering £7.5 million.
It’s an astonishing price for the area of South London. Not only is it almost double the £3.8million that Gina and Tress paid in 2015, but it’s £2.5 million more than the top price paid previously for any property in their street.
Zoopla had estimated its value as between £3.8 million and £4.6 million …
The sale, which Land Registry documents confirm went through in January, is all the more impressive as it comes when British property prices are predicted to plunge by ten per cent.
The five-bedroom Edwardian house is in one of London’s most desirable areas. Ramsay, 56, and his wife, 48, bought it in their joint names from Gina and Tress, the founder of upmarket homeware and clothing chain Oliver Bonas.
Gina, 45, left Tress, 55, with whom she has three children, for former health secretary Hancock, 44, who competed in I’m a Celebrity . . . Get Me Out Of Here!.
Ramsay, who has an estimated fortune of £175 million, already owns a huge house, said to be worth £7 million, less than a mile away …
Last year, he, Tana and their five children were reported to have temporarily moved out after work began on a super-basement …
Tatler adds:
It is easy to see why Ramsay might need a new home. The chef announced at the start of the year that he and wife Tana are expecting their sixth child. On the Heart Breakfast show, the chef said that ‘there’s one more on the way’ to join their five children: Megan, 25, twins Jack and Holly, 23, Tilly, 21, and Oscar, three. Holly recently featured as one of the most eligible singles at Tatler’s Little Black Book party. According to Hello! magazine, the Ramsays are believed to have paid in cash for their new luxury pad; they also own a £6 million house in Cornwall and a mansion in Los Angeles. Gordon and Tana marked their 26th wedding anniversary very recently, having married in Chelsea in 1996.
On March 6, as The Lockdown Files were drawing to a close, The Telegraph reported, ‘Matt Hancock cancelled after indiscreet WhatsApps “upset” travel industry’:
A major international travel conference has axed Matt Hancock from its programme after The Telegraph revealed he had been highly critical of the travel sector during the pandemic.
The Institute of Travel and Tourism (ITT) confirmed that Mr Hancock will no longer be speaking at its annual conference in Doha, Qatar, saying that the messages uncovered by The Telegraph had caused upset to many in the travel industry.
Last week, as part of its Lockdown Files series, The Telegraph revealed that Mr Hancock and Simon Case, the country’s most senior civil servant, shared jokes about those being forced to stay in quarantine hotel rooms during the pandemic …
The former health secretary was also highly critical of the airline and airports industry, describing them as being “totally offside” and “unhelpful”, while Mr Case [top civil servant Simon Case] labelled them as “horribly self-serving” ...
In a statement to The Telegraph, Steven Freudman, chairman of the ITT, said that Mr Hancock had become a “major distraction”.
He added: “We have over 25 distinguished speakers and it would have been unfair on them for the focus to have been solely on Matt Hancock.”
The ITT annual conference is regarded as one of the sector’s key annual events, with thousands of travel professionals and high-profile speakers from across the globe attending.
The initial decision to invite Mr Hancock as a speaker at the conference was widely criticised by sector figures even before The Lockdown Files revelations were published.
Industry figures told The Independent that they wanted the ITT to reconsider its decision, accusing Mr Hancock’s policies of “destroying the sector” and resulting in thousands of travel jobs being lost …
Dr Freudman said: “The original invitation was issued in the hope that Matt Hancock would recognise the damage that he and his government caused the travel industry with its handling of the pandemic.
“We were also hoping that he might confirm that lessons had been learnt and that any future crises would be handled differently.
“However, his WhatsApp messages have upset many of us in the travel industry and his presence would clearly have been a major distraction.”
The Telegraph has contacted Mr Hancock for comment.
That day, Hancock’s lawyer appeared on GB News and was introduced as such. He responded vehemently that he did not want that detail mentioned. The presenter calmly read out the lawyer’s email to GB News stating that he permitted them to describe him as Hancock’s lawyer. The lawyer sheepishly responded that he forgot to type ‘not’. Comedy gold:
Isabel Oakeshott describes The Telegraph ‘bunker’
Hancock gave Oakeshott access to the 100,000 WhatsApp messages because she co-authored his book, Pandemic Diaries.
On Friday, March 24, she wrote an article for Tatler describing what working in seclusion with The Lockdown Files reporters was like at the beginning of 2023:
… The Daily Telegraph was the only newspaper that consistently challenged the lockdown agenda and had a track record of managing huge investigations in the public interest – famously exposing the MPs’ expenses claims in a scandal that rocked Westminster in 2009. They immediately agreed to put a full team of top journalists on the project: The Lockdown Files.
In a secure bunker, well away from the main newsroom, I worked alongside their reporters, filleting the messages: a team of eight or so, full time, for eight weeks. To avoid hackers, our computers were not connected to the internet. We worked from hard drives stored overnight in a safe. Anything printed was swiftly shredded. Nobody else came into the bunker, which, as the weeks went by, became increasingly unhygienic. Discarded takeaway containers, half-eaten packets of Colin the Caterpillar sweets, mouldy mugs and other detritus were strewn over every grubby surface. Hunched over our computers in a room with no windows, we were like lab rats in some dubious experiment, wracked by colds, coughs and – oh, the irony – Covid. By the week of publication, our core team had swelled to some 25 writers and digital news experts. The Daily Telegraph’s newsroom was emptying out – leaving those who remained wondering where all their colleagues had gone.
There was a curious voyeuristic pleasure in reading the banter between Government ministers and their aides – including some very flirty exchanges between two household names. Who was sending who the heart emojis and who was complimenting who on their sexy outfits? I’ll leave it to your imagination. Suffice to say, they wouldn’t be too happy if that news was in the public domain.
On Sunday, March 26, we got an answer about the heart emojis. Michael Gove sent them to Hancock:
Hancock responded, ‘You have been true throughout’.
Gove explained to Sophy Ridge on Sky News that he agreed, particularly on that day, with Hancock’s course of action. No surprise there. They’re cut from the same cloth.
Guido Fawkes has the interview:
Oakeshott’s article continues:
The WhatsApp from Matt Hancock came through at 1.20am: ‘You have made a big mistake,’ it said darkly – leaving me to imagine what punishment he had in mind. The following day, he released a furious statement, accusing me of ‘massive betrayal’. Fair enough – I had breached his trust and would face plenty of questions about that decision. But did anyone outside the media bubble seriously doubt it was for the public good? The torrent of grateful messages from ordinary people, often with harrowing personal stories about their own suffering during lockdown, was answer enough for me … Dining in a mountain restaurant in the French Alps, my partner, Richard Tice [leader of the Reform Party], was surprised – and touched – to be passed a note by the waiter from a fellow diner who had recognised him. On the crumpled piece of paper were the words ‘please thank Isabel’.
Lord Sumption on Hancock: ‘a fanatic’
On March 10, after The Lockdown Files came to an end, Lord Sumption, a former Supreme Court justice and guardian of civil liberties, wrote an editorial for The Telegraph: ‘Matt Hancock was never a policy maker — he was a fanatic’:
The 19th-century sage William Hazlitt once observed that those who love liberty love their fellow men, while those who love power love only themselves. Matt Hancock says that he has been betrayed by the leaking of his WhatsApp messages. But few people will have any sympathy for him. He glutted on power and too obviously loved himself.
Some things can be said in his favour. The Lockdown Files are not a complete record. No doubt there were also phone calls, Zoom meetings, civil service memos and the like, in which the thoughts of ministers and officials may have been more fully laid out …
Nevertheless, Hancock’s WhatsApp messages offer an ugly insight into the workings of government at a time when it aspired to micromanage every aspect of our lives. They reveal the chaos and incoherence at the heart of government, as decisions were made on the hoof. They expose the fallacy that ministers were better able to judge our vulnerabilities than we were ourselves. They throw a harsh light on those involved: their narcissism, their superficiality, their hypocrisies great and small. Above all, they show in embarrassing detail how completely power corrupts those who have it.
… Even the most ardent lockdown sceptics accept that in extreme cases drastic measures may be required. But Covid-19 was not an extreme case …
No government, anywhere, had previously sought to deal with epidemic disease by closing down much of society. No society has ever improved public health by making itself poorer …
The fateful moment came when the government chose to go for coercion. This ruled out any distinction between the vulnerable and the invulnerable, because it would have been too difficult to police. It also meant that ministers began to manipulate public opinion, exaggerating the risks in order to justify their decision and scare people into compliance. So we had the theatrical announcement of the latest death toll at daily press conferences from Downing Street. Shocking posters appeared on our streets (“Look him in the eyes”, etc). Matt Hancock announced that “if you go out, people will die”.
The scare campaign created a perfect storm, for it made it more difficult to lift the lockdown …
Hancock was the chief peddler of the idea that everyone was equally at risk from Covid-19. This proposition was patently untrue, but it was useful because it frightened people. “It’s not unhelpful having people think they could be next,” wrote his special adviser, who knew his master’s mind well. Other countries did not behave like this. In Sweden state epidemiologist Anders Tegnell was able to reassure his public that a lockdown was neither necessary nor helpful. Events have proved him right.
… Matt Hancock insisted on schoolchildren wearing masks in class in spite of scientific advice that it made little difference, because it was necessary to keep up with Nicola Sturgeon. When Rishi Sunak had the temerity to suggest that once the vaccine rollout started the lockdown should be relaxed, Hancock resisted. “This is not a SAGE call,” he said, “it’s a political call.”
Once ministers had started on this course, there was no turning back. It is hard to admit that you have inflicted untold damage on a whole society by mistake. Hancock resisted shortening the 14-day quarantine period in spite of scientific advice that five days was enough, because he did not want to admit that the original policy had been wrong. Relevant evidence was simply shut out. His response to the success of Sweden’s policies was not to learn from it but to dismiss it as the “f—ing Swedish argument”. Having no grounds for rejecting the Swedish argument, he had to ask his advisers to find him some. “Supply three or four bullet [points] of why Sweden is wrong,” he barked.
The adrenalin of power is corrosive. It was largely responsible for the sheer nastiness of the Government’s response to criticism. Hancock lashed out at the least signs of resistance or dissent. He wanted internal critics sacked or moved. He suggested the cancellation of a learning disability hub in the constituency of an MP who intended to vote against the tier system. Ministers “got heavy” with the police to make them tougher on the public …
I’ll get to the learning disability hub in a moment. Shameful, just shameful.
Lord Sumption’s editorial continues:
There is no sign that Hancock either thought or cared about the wider consequences of his measures. He seems to have believed that there was no limit to the amount of human misery and economic destruction that was worth enduring in order to keep the Covid numbers down. Rishi Sunak is on record as saying that any discussion of the wider problems was ruled out in advance, and this is fully borne out by the WhatsApp messages. Any hint from Sunak or business secretary Alok Sharma that the cure might be worse than the disease provoked an explosion of bile but no actual answers.
Hancock fought tooth and nail to close schools and keep them closed. Deprived of many months of education, cooped up indoors and terrified by government warnings that they would kill their grandparents by hugging them, children suffered a sharp rise in mental illness and self-harm although they were themselves at no risk from Covid-19. Cancer patients were left undiagnosed and untreated. Old people, deprived of stimulation, succumbed to dementia in large numbers. Small businesses were destroyed which had taken a lifetime to build up. A joyless puritanism infected government policy. No travel. No wedding parties or funeral wakes. No hugs. Anyone who spoke up for a measure of decency or moderation in this surreal world was promptly slapped down as a “w—er”.
Real policy-making is never black and white like this. It is always a matter of judgment, of weighing up pros and cons. In that sense, Matt Hancock was never a policy-maker. He was a fanatic.
Why did hitherto decent people behave like this? In Hancock’s case, at least part of the answer is vanity. The crisis was good for his profile. He saw himself as the man of action, the Churchill of public health, the saviour of his people, earning the plaudits of a grateful nation. As early as January 2020, he was sharing a message from a sycophantic “wise friend” assuring him that a “well-handled crisis of this scale could propel you into the next league”. He fussed over his tweets. He pushed his way in front of every press camera. He tried to divert the credit for the vaccines from Kate Bingham to himself. “I think I look great” is one of his more memorable messages.
Sumption says that Boris Johnson, his Cabinet and his advisers could not have restrained Hancock. Boris had no strategy, and the others were lacklustre:
Apart from Sunak and Gove, his Cabinet was probably the most mediocre band of British ministers for nearly a century. Collectively, they proved unable to look at the whole problem in the round. Their eyes were never on the ball. They were not even on the field. These are the lessons of this sorry business.
Blocking disability hub
Hancock did not tolerate Conservative MPs voting against his health policies during the pandemic.
On Tuesday, March 7, The Telegraph led with a story about James Daly MP from Bury North:
‘Matt Hancock’s plan to block funding for disabled children if MP opposed lockdown’ tells us:
Matt Hancock discussed a plan to block funding for a new centre for disabled children and adults as a way of pressuring a rebel Tory MP to back new lockdown restrictions, The Lockdown Files show.
WhatsApp messages between Mr Hancock, the then health secretary, and his political aide show they discussed taking a plan for a learning disability hub in Bury, Greater Manchester, “off the table” if James Daly, the Bury North MP, sided against the Government in a key vote.
It came ahead of the vote on Dec 1, 2020 on the introduction of a toughened new local tiers system of restrictions for England.
The Telegraph has also obtained a WhatsApp message with an attached list of 95 Conservative MPs planning to vote against the tier system and detailing their concerns about it.
The article has that list.
On November 20, 2020, Allan Nixon, one of Hancock’s Spads (special advisers) WhatsApped his boss:
… Thoughts on me suggesting to Chief’s spads that they give us a list of the 2019 intakes thinking of rebelling. Eg James wants his Learning Disability Hub in Bury – whips call him up and say Health team want to work with him to deliver this but that’ll be off the table if he rebels
These guys’ re-election hinges on us in a lot of instances, and we know what they want. We should seriously consider using it IMO
Hancock replied:
yes, 100%
James Daly only found out about this through The Lockdown Files:
Mr Daly – whose constituency is the most marginal in the UK mainland with a majority of just 105 – told The Telegraph he was “appalled” and “disgusted” that the disability hub, for which he had been campaigning, had been discussed as a way of coercing him into voting with the Government.
He said he had never been contacted by the Whips’ Office and no threat to block the scheme had been made.
The conversation between Nixon and Hancock continued on December 1, 2020:
On the morning of the vote, Mr Hancock messaged his adviser to say: “James Daly is with us”, but Mr Nixon responded with the caveat: “If extra hospitality support is forthcoming.”
Later that day, Mr Nixon also forwarded his boss a new list of MPs who were undecided on the vote. In the event, Mr Daly voted against the Government, according to the parliamentary record.
In total, 55 Conservative MPs opposed the tiers system, forcing Mr Johnson to rely on Labour abstaining to get the measures through. It was, at the time, the biggest rebellion of the Johnson administration.
After revealing that he had not been contacted by the Whips’ Office, Mr Daly said: “It sounds like the whips didn’t bother.”
The Bury North MP said he was surprised that the hub, which would allow specialists to coordinate activity under one roof, was even being threatened because “it never got dangled in the first place”.
He added: “They were never proposing to give it to me. I still don’t have it. Even though I have repeatedly campaigned for it, Hancock never showed the slightest bit of interest in supporting it. I had a number of conversations with Hancock at that time, but I can definitively say the hub was never mentioned.
“I think it is appalling. The fact that they would only give a much needed support for disabled people if I voted for this was absolutely disgusting.”
Mr Daly had discussed the need for the centre with Mr Hancock in January 2020. In a post on his website about “how we improve health outcomes for all Bury North residents”, he published a photograph of himself with the then health secretary. The hub, he said, would benefit “the most vulnerable in our community”.
That afternoon, The Telegraph published ‘Rishi Sunak rebukes Matt Hancock over plot to block disability funding’:
Downing Street has rebuked Matt Hancock after it emerged that he had discussed a plan to block funding for a new disabled centre to pressure a Tory MP to back lockdown restrictions …
Asked whether this was not the way Rishi Sunak would like his ministers to operate, the Prime Minister’s official spokesman said: “Of course. There are rules and guidelines which apply.
“I can’t speak for the actions of a former government. I think you heard from the Prime Minister, who said it’s important that the inquiry looks at all the issues in a complete way rather than relying on piecemeal bits of information.
“You will know that funding decisions are taken in line with strict guidelines to ensure value for money set out in the spending framework, and ministers’ departments are held accountable for their decisions.”
Allison Pearson: Hancock ‘should be arrested’
After The Telegraph published No. 10’s rebuke to Hancock, one of the paper’s columnists, Allison Pearson, weighed in with ‘Matt Hancock should be arrested for wilful misconduct in public office’:
… Dismayingly, if not entirely unpredictably, it was the very restrictions Matt Hancock and his lockdown zealots told us were necessary to save the health service which have very nearly finished it off. “The NHS has collapsed anyway as a direct result of the lockdowns and the vast backlog they caused,” says my source. Ironies don’t come much more bitter than that …
Just when you think he has sunk as low as is humanly possible, he ponders using children with special educational needs as leverage (“yes 100%,” enthused Hancock). By unhappy coincidence, I have just had an email from Rob, a father with an autistic son. This is what Rob wrote: “Lockdown sent him from a happy 14-year-old into a complete psychological breakdown. The fear of why everyone was wearing masks, the breaking of routine (so important for SEN children) and closing of schools. He was utterly terrified. The knock-on-effect for our family has been devastating. Thanks to anti-psych meds he’s slowly getting there, but from the second lockdown onwards it’s destroyed the fabric of our family to say nothing of our life savings being lost (self-employed). To read the WhatsApps in The Telegraph makes me so angry. Having the heartbreak of a disabled child made worse by self-aggrandising fools is almost too much to take. Administering psychiatric medicines to your child tends to focus the mind as to where the blame lies and it isn’t with Isabel Oakeshott.”
Well, there’s another Hancock Triumph. A 14-year-old boy who successfully had the pants frightened off him. (Hope you feel proud of yourself, Matt.) Are Members of Parliament seriously not going to debate what we suspected, but now know for sure, was done quite deliberately to Rob’s son and thousands of other vulnerable children, some of them no longer with us because they were scared into taking their own lives? …
As for Matt Hancock, he has lost the Whip and, unfortunately, can no longer be disciplined by the Conservative party. The slithy tove can – and must – be dragged before a Select Committee. Personally, I would like to see him in jail for the vast hurt he has caused.
Are there grounds for a prosecution of the former minister for misconduct in a public office? Did Matt Hancock “wilfully misconduct himself to such a degree as to amount to an abuse of the public’s trust in the office holder without reasonable excuse or justification”? …
Now, that’s what I call an Urgent Question.
Also of interest is ‘Dominic Cummings takes “nightmare” swipe at Rishi Sunak and Matt Hancock’.
I hope to wrap up the rest of my review of The Lockdown Files tomorrow.
In 1980s Britain, Marco Pierre White (MPW) was the original enfant terrible of young chefs.
He went on to win not only Michelin stars but also start the careers of the youngsters working in his kitchen at Harveys in Wandsworth Common, London.
Gordon Ramsay, Stephen Terry and Phil Howard all worked for MPW at the same time, more about which below.
However, more important is the bad rap that liver gets.
This is because most liver is cut into thin, shoe sole slices and is overcooked.
Whenever someone says to me, ‘Liver? Yuck!’, I tell them they’d love it if they ate it my way: thick with a somewhat crusty exterior and rare on the inside. A butcher will gladly cut liver to order.
A masterclass in cooking liver
Fortunately, Marco Pierre White likes it the same way and demonstrates how to cook liver properly in this video, which is around seven and a half minutes long. The liver recipe at the beginning only takes a couple of minutes to watch:
An Italian responding to the video says that this is (emphases mine below):
Fegato alla veneziana = Venetian liver. The mother of Marco grew up in Venice.
As is true of the most authentic Italian cuisine, this dish has three ingredients. Marco prepares sautéed liver, onions and adds a small amount of vinegar for the sauce.
The video begins with the sautéed onions on a plate with the vinegar added, making a sauce of sorts.
Now on to the liver:
1/ Marco salts the liver by hand from a great height, then grinds pepper on it the same way. This is because seasonings disperse better on food when applied from shoulder height.
2/ Marco dusts the thick slice of liver with flour, then shakes off the excess. He doesn’t say so, but you should season the flour with salt before dredging anything in it, even if you’ve already seasoned the main ingredient. Otherwise, what ever you cook in it will taste of just flour: terrible.
3/ He puts the liver in a preheated pan that has sizzling oil in it, just covering the bottom.
4/ When the liver has ‘caramelised nicely’ on the bottom, flip it over and cook until it is ‘nicely golden brown’. So, one side should be caramelised and the other golden brown.
5/ The finished product should be pink inside. Marco explains that this has to do with the temperature of the pan. If the pan is too hot, the flour on the outside of the liver will be scorched. If the pan is too cool, the liver goes soggy. Once you think it is cooked enough, lightly touch the top of the liver. If it springs back, it’s rare. The more the surface of the liver solidifies, the more well done it is, which is not what one wants.
If you don’t want to touch the liver, Marco says to watch for the blood to come to the top, at which point it is done.
6/ Remove the liver from the pan, let any excess fat drip off of it and put on top of the plated onions and vinegar sauce.
Because the video is old, the cut liver doesn’t look that pink. However, when Marco feeds one of his sous chefs a little bit from the top of a long knife, the sous chef says it’s great:
It’s the business.
Liver is an important protein:
Liver is actually one of the most nutrient dense foods you can eat and therefore one of the healthiest food choices you can make. If you get and buy local or fresh sources you can it eat it raw and it’s even better for you that way. We humans would eat the liver raw right after a kill while hunting. I prefer to process it and bring it home.
Done properly, liver should be pink in the middle:
… yes, the liver should be still pink when plated otherwise the texture will be too tough!
A viewer made Marco’s Venetian liver and enjoyed it:
I have just prepared and eaten MPW’s onion liver. Yummy.
These days, Marco is the face of Knorr’s seasoning cubes:
Check out his section on the Knorr website. Excellent cooking ideas for the home cook to try out. He even managed to improve on my own Spaghetti bolognaise recipe, and I didn’t think that was possible!
The video comes from a late 1980s show on Channel 4, which had just started broadcasting. Channel 4 has always been known for its innovation in programming.
YouTube has more episodes, but there aren’t many, because MPW stopped filming halfway through the series. Another commenter says:
They only managed to film 3 episodes before Marco told them to get the f…k out of his kitchen, apparently it was supposed to be a 6 episode deal with the newly launched Channel 4. Sorry about that.
The video is so nostalgic. There’s smoking indoors! We even see the little square in the upper right hand corner of the screen, signalling that a commercial break was coming up:
Ahhhh the box with the diagonal lines in the right hand corner of the screen that told you the adverts were coming up took me back.
After Marco gives the sous chef a taste of the liver, they discuss their mentor, Albert Roux:
Albert Roux mentored Marco plus many of his crew at La Gavroche in the 80’s.
Apparently Marco worked at a butchers shop and a couple other little enterprises Albert ran as well.
This was the dialogue:
Chef: Albert Roux is my mentor.
Marco: OUR MENTOR.
In the 1980s, Marco Pierre White was known for his pre-Raphaelite looks, especially his hair. He looked like an angel but ran his kitchen like a demon:
Marco is a frightening man in the kitchen. Honestly doesn’t even compare to how Gordon treats his staff, this guy was just plain scary.
Gordon Ramsay wrote about his time with Marco:
Oh, believe me, Marco yelled at everyone in that kitchen from the chefs to the waiters, read one of Gordon’s books and he’ll tell you no one was safe.
Today, somewhat grizzled, MPW owns several branded restaurant enterprises that are franchise operations.
Harveys
Harveys opened in 1987. It was a small restaurant in South London. MPW co-owned it with another restaurateur, Nigel Platts-Martin.
It attracted celebrities and, despite its size, was a bit of a status symbol. No doubt the French maître d’ and French waiters helped.
MPW hired young male sous chefs and commis who, somehow, managed to dance around each other in a demanding kitchen environment:
I can’t believe there are not more fights … Look how they are all crammed in there running around so close and for 12 hours a day.
In the video, he tells the interviewer what he wants from his staff:
Interviewer: “What it is it you want out of them?”
Marco: “I want loyalty, I want finesse out of the them.”
There was only ever one woman in MPW’s brigade, and she did not appear until the late 1980s or early 1990s:
Chef Gigi Mon Ami worked with Gordon Ramsay when he was Sous Chef at Marco Pierre White’s Michelin rated “Harvey’s” restaurant in Wandsworth Common, U.K. Gigi wrote about it in Moon On A Platter, but she also taught Culinary Fine Dining @ JobCorps- and said Gordon actually was very nice to her; kind of looked after her in Marco’s kitchen cuz he had hired her as a joke; she was the only girl in the kitchen, late 80’s. Ever since then, kind of a soft spot for Ramsay – that’s the way European kitchens were in the 80’s and into the 90’s before everything was PC.
Chef Gigi Mon Ami from San Francisco even wrote a book about it, Moon On A Platter. She travelled the world and was often the only woman in the kitchens in which she cooked.
The restaurant closed in 1993 with two Michelin stars awarded to MPW, who said that he wanted a third star and that, in order to win it, he would have to work in larger premises.
The young men, Marco included, did not cover their longish hair. All of them look like budding pop stars, including Gordon Ramsay:
Ramsay has looked exactly the same since 1987…except he doesn’t still have that Flock of Seagulls haircut.
One commenter on the video above wondered how Marco could have earned his Michelin stars with all those uncovered heads:
I mean the amount of hair the customers must have found in the food …
Marco had a penchant for giving his staff and customers a taste of his food. AA Gill, referred to below, was one of our great — and young — food critics at the time:
I love it when he feeds his cook the liver [and] onions with the knife… apparently this was something he loved to do. I remember reading AA Gill; he wrote that Marco hand fed something to the girl who was his guest at the time. Kinda cute, considering how much of a culinary behemoth he is. For me it says that he really, really does care about food and feeding people and creating gastronomic happiness at the highest level. Awesome.
Gordon Ramsay
Many of the comments on the video concern Gordon Ramsay who graces our television screens around the world, moreso than his mentor Marco.
Marco Pierre White is the only chef who ever made Gordon Ramsay cry. Unfortunately, this is not on video, but, allegedly, a spokesperson for Ramsay says that it’s true.
Commenters argued over who is the better chef.
Some say that Gordon merely copied Marco:
Ramsay copied so much from him, from his plates, recipes (scallops with curry powder, tagliatelles, etc) and embellishes so much. Marco is so much more authentic.
Several people pointed out that Gordon also copied Marco’s gestures but that Marco’s delivery of criticism was more constructive:
Notice, Marco says “come here” with a gesture only and then teaches the person something when they get there, whereas Gordon screams “come here” to the person, then insults them when they get there. Marco attacks the mistake, Gordon attacks the person. I know who’s the scarier of the two. And the better chef.
Someone else agreed:
At around 7:20 you can see Gordon blink his eyes like he is crying, there was another video at the end of which Marco says to Gordon, “You know, you cry every night”. In a Boiling Point episode, Gordon tells a young cook that he is nothing but a big baby cause Gordon caught him crying. Hell, when Gordon was his age he was crying his eyes out every night.
Another says that Marco is better:
Marco is the only chef in history to get 3 stars AND 5 spoons and forks in the Michelin Guide for his restaurant The Oak Room. That is total excellence. The great thing about it, is that he was doing a lot of the cooking when he achieved that honor. Gordon has 12 stars, most of which are not because of his cooking, but the cooking of others. Those stars belong to those chefs that work under his brand, not to him.
Anyone expecting the young Ramsay to speak will be disappointed:
Thumbs up if that’s the quietest you’ve ever seen Ramsay in the kitchen, haha.
And is it true that when he left he stole the Harveys reservations book?
Ramsey recently confesses he was so jealous of Marco that he went in Harvey’s and stole the booking book.
Stephen Terry
I didn’t even recognise Stephen Terry in the video. He returned to Wales to open his own restaurant:
Wow, look how young Stephen Terry is…….. He has the Hardwick Restaurant in Raglan near me 🙂
On a break, the interviewer asks him how he feels when Marco bawls him out. Terry shrugs and says:
It’s for a reason. It’s never not for a reason, the reason being that you’ve done something wrong or you’ve done something you shouldn’t have done … You’re learning all the time.
Back in the kitchen, Marco criticises Terry for the presentation of one the plates:
“You wanna do things like that, go to a florist!”
The love for a professional kitchen
Although a professional kitchen looks like a living hell, young men in particular still aspire to becoming professional chefs:
Yo, for real, passion is the only thing that drives you working in a kitchen, you face long hours, so much stress, burns, cuts and running, it’s physically and mentally draining for any person, but I love it. The people you work with, it’s like a family and it’s full of weird people hahaha but we’re always for each other and we always do our best. Sometimes Chefs can be tough, but even the tougher [ones] reward the staff and congratulate them for everything. It’s actually a beautiful job, but it’s tough, really tough.
Another commenter agreed on passion being an essential ingredient to a successful cooking career:
I love food. I love to eat it, i love to touch it, I love to change it, the way it sounds in the pan, the happiness it gives when it’s served, to improve my techniques and to magnify the ingredients. It’s all about passion really. And it should be, otherwise no one could do it.
Anthony Bourdain put it best when he wrote about the importance of cameraderie in the professional kitchen, a dangerous place:
The ability to ‘work well with others’ is a must. If you’re a sauté man, your grill man is your dance partner, and chances are, you’re spending the majority of your time working in a hot, uncomfortably confined, submarine-like space with him. You’re both working around open flame, boiling liquids with plenty of blunt objects at close hand-and you both carry knives, lots of knives. So you had better get along. It will not do to have two heavily armed cooks duking it out behind the line over some perceived insult when there are vats of boiling grease and razor-sharp cutlery all around.
I will post at least one more Marco Pierre White video.
For now, though, I hope that you try his Venetian liver recipe. It’s a keeper.
In case you’ve missed the earlier posts in this series, here they are: parts 1, 2, 3 and 4.
The best known of the minority MPs from David Cameron’s premiership — 2010 to 2016 — is Rishi Sunak, who is Chancellor of the Exchequer.
He represents the Richmond constituency in Yorkshire.
Early years
Rishi Sunak’s grandparents moved from the Punjab province of India to East Africa. Rishi’s mother Usha was born in Tanzania. His father Yashvir was born in Kenya. Both are Hindus.
Both sets of grandparents migrated to the UK in the 1960s.
After marriage, Usha and Yashvir settled in Southampton, on the southern coast of England. Usha worked locally as a pharmacist. Yashvir was a general practitioner.
The couple have three children: Rishi, another son Sanjay, who is a psychologist, and a daughter Raakhi, who works on COVID-19 strategy for the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office.
Rishi Sunak went to the renowned public (private) school Winchester College, founded in 1382, where he was head boy and editor of the student newspaper.
He then went to Lincoln College, Oxford, where he graduated with a First in 2001 in PPE, which is nothing to do with hospital gowns, rather Philosophy, Politics and Economics. Whilst at Oxford, he did a brief stint at Conservative Campaign Headquarters.
During summer holidays he worked at a curry house in Southampton.
Sunak began his career at Goldman Sachs, where he worked as an analyst from 2001 to 2004.
He then decided to study for an MBA at Stanford University in California, where he met his wife, Akshata Murthy, the daughter of the Indian billionaire N. R. Narayana Murthy, the man behind Infosys. The couple married in 2005. Sunak, a Fulbright Scholar, completed his MBA in 2006.
Sunak and his wife settled in England and have two young daughters.
Prior to entering politics, Sunak worked for two hedge funds and was also the director of one of his father-in-law’s companies, Catamaran Ventures.
Political career
Former Conservative Party leader William Hague represented Richmond, which has been a safe seat for the party for over a century.
Rishi Sunak was elected comfortably to his first term with a majority of 19,550 (36.2%). Once in Parliament, he was appointed to the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Select Committee.
Sunak was also committed to Brexit and was an early advocate of free ports, having written a report on the concept in 2016, the year of the referendum.
In 2017, with Theresa May as Prime Minister, Sunak won re-election with an even greater majority of 23,108 (40.5%). In Parliament, he continued to support Brexit, voting for Theresa May’s deal and against a referendum on a final withdrawal agreement in 2019.
That year, Theresa May stood down as PM. Sunak supported Boris Johnson in the ensuing leadership contest.
That autumn, during the general election campaign, he appeared on a television debate, representing the Conservatives:
I am sure Sunak did better than Iain Dale gave him credit for:
He also participated in a seven-way debate on ITV.
On December 12, Sunak further increased his margin of victory at the polls to 27,210 (47.2%).
The coronavirus Chancellor — and some inside scoops
Then, in February 2020, Prime Minister Boris Johnson replaced Sajid Javid with Rishi Sunak as Chancellor:
He gave his first budget less than a month later, on Wednesday, March 11, which I wrote about at the time.
The following Monday, March 16, Boris announced social distancing rules and the closure of pubs, restaurants and events venues. Rishi spoke at one of Boris’s televised coronavirus briefings with news of a generous financial package:
Guido Fawkes posted the full video and remarked (emphasis in the original):
You wouldn’t guess he’s only been in the job for five weeks…
Full details are here. Sunak also issued a Twitter thread with a summary:
Then lockdown came a week later on Monday, March 23.
A few days later, Boris was struggling with his bout of coronavirus, as was Health Secretary Matt Hancock:
The Conservatives soared to record approval ratings in the polls:
Early in April, Boris was quietly rushed to St Thomas’ Hospital in London. Rishi did another coronavirus briefing to reassure an anxious nation:
The well-spoken, gentle Sunak appealed greatly to the folks at home. The Independent did not like that one bit.
Society magazine Tatler began running articles on Sunak in March. They could see he would quickly become a cult personality.
On March 18, the magazine posted an article by Annabel Sampson, ‘Everything you need to know about Britain’s new Chancellor, Rishi Sunak’.
It begins with this (emphases mine):
The virtues of 39-year-old Rishi Sunak have been extolled many times over; for his charming demeanour, his razor sharp brain and his acute financial sense. Now the man who has come to be recognised as the ‘Maharaja of the Dales’, thanks to his Indian ancestry and Yorkshire home, has been appointed to the highest office in the country, to Boris Johnson’s Cabinet in the role of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the second biggest government job; and the second youngest person ever to take the position.
The appointment follows the ‘Cabinet Reshuffle’ that occurred in February when Savid Javid, the former Chancellor, resigned when he was asked to get rid – reportedly a request linked to Dominic Cummings – of his closest aides. Rishi Sunak’s star has been rising for some time now, so his appointment to the position will have baffled few.
The article has several photos, including one of Sunak in the Yorkshire countryside and one with his dog, which resembles Boris Johnson’s Welsh rescue pup, Dilyn.
Sunak and his wife had a traditional Indian wedding:
Rishi and Akshata were married in her hometown of Bangalore, in a two-day ceremony attended by 1,000 guests.
Akshata is a working mother:
Akshata runs her own fashion label Akshata Designs and is also a director of a venture capital firm founded by her father in 2010. Her designs are wonderful; she’s been profiled by Vogue India and been credited for creating clothes that are ‘vehicles to discovering Indian culture’ – comprised of chic silhouettes with bold, Indian design.
Did we know that the Sunaks throw great parties? We do now:
With their combined wealth, they understandably have a generously sized home in Northallerton, North Yorkshire (in Sunak’s constituency). The Daily Mail reports that their annual summer garden party is a county highlight; where uniformed staff loft around serving ice cold champagne and canapés (no doubt prepared by the prestigious Yorkshire Party Company).
Sunak is a natural at politics:
According to the Daily Mail, ‘While many MPs stutter and trundle their way through their maiden speech in the Commons, Mr Sunak’s at-ease manner provided a glimmer of what was to come’. One ally in parliament told the Telegraph: ‘He’s ferociously intelligent and thoroughly decent at the same time’ …
He was one of the few Conservatives who were let loose on the air waves (14 times in total) and allowed to make public appearances during the election campaign last year. He has even been dubbed the ‘Prime Minister-in-waiting’, we’ll see. His first big challenge was the March budget; and now he is juggling the unprecedented complexity of the impact of the coronavirus on the economy. The UK are in safe hands.
The article also has a photo of him supporting Yorkshire County Cricket at Edgbaston.
Early in July, Tatler‘s Ben Judah travelled to Sunak’s home town of Southampton and reported his findings in ‘Inside the world of Rishi Sunak’.
Naturally, Judah went to the curry house where Sunak worked during his summer holidays:
The kitchen at Kuti’s Brasserie, not far from Southampton docks, was not the sort of place, in August 1998, you would have gone looking for a future hedge funder, son-in-law of a billionaire and Conservative chancellor.
That summer – the summer of the France 98 World Cup and the Omagh bombing – Kuti Miah, the eponymous restaurateur behind the curry house, went to have a word with one of his waiters. ‘You’re going to be someone, Rishi,’ he said. The future UK chancellor flashed his famous smile. He was, adds Miah, ‘a brilliant talker’. Rishi Sunak, then 18, was about to go to Oxford, but that holiday he waited tables for Miah, a close family friend, to earn some pocket money. ‘I saw him grow up,’ says Miah. ‘His father used to bring him in his carry cot.’
Miah was fast friends with Yashvir and Usha Sunak, both Hindu Punjabis born in colonial Kenya and Tanzania respectively, whose parents had migrated from India. After India’s independence, both families left East Africa for Southampton in the mid-to-late 1960s. Yashvir and Usha met in Britain and married. He became a local GP and she ran a pharmacy. They were ‘brilliant conversationalists’ and ‘very strong believers’ who ‘worked very, very hard’, according to Miah, who also recalls that they were ‘passionately British’.
Rishi, the eldest of their three children, was cut from the same patriotic cloth. Not only did the young Sunak fall in love with the game of cricket, he fervently supported England over India at any opportunity. His career, too, has followed one of the most traditional and storied of England’s paths to power. Like five chancellors of the exchequer before him, Sunak was schooled at the ancient and distinguished Winchester College; and like three of those same Wykehamist chancellors, he went on, as was expected, to study at Oxford.
The article includes a photo of Sunak with his wife and in-laws.
Ben Judah had met Rishi Sunak before, in 2015, just before the general election that year. They met up in Northallerton, North Yorkshire:
We were a long way from London – from where Sunak had been ‘parachuted in’ for the seat. During the interview, I had a distinct sense of being the only person in the cafe who knew that this slight man in a Barbour jacket was running for parliament. ‘I tell this story when I’m out and about,’ he said, coffee in hand, ‘that you can come to this country with very little… My grandparents came with very little from a village in northern India, and two generations on, their grandson has this enormous privilege of running as a candidate for parliament. For my family, the route was education.’
Well said.
Sunak’s candidacy in 2015 raised some eyebrows:
He was vying for a seat once presided over by Tory grandees William Hague and Leon Brittan. But I had spent days in Richmond and the surrounding area, reporting on the resentment his sudden arrival had stirred up among certain local Tory notables, who felt the seat in the Dales was rightfully theirs. ‘There was a very acrimonious constituency battle,’ claimed one source, with a lot of hostility to an outsider coming in.
Sunak’s wife had also met with some resistance on the campaign trail, says Judah.
However, Sunak’s father-in-law enthusiastically flew to England where he helped to campaign:
Sunak’s billionaire father-in-law, NR Narayana Murthy, however, has been so enthusiastic about Sunak’s parliamentary career that he’d flown in, and had even been leafleting on his behalf, wearing a Rishi sweatshirt. ‘To be honest,’ said Sunak in Costa Coffee that day, ‘I think it’s patronising to assume minorities should only run in minority seats.’
The article discusses Sunak’s property profile:
On 7 May 2015, Sunak won, with more than 50 per cent of the vote (a Ukip vote of 15 per cent had appeared from nowhere). He put down roots in his new constituency of Richmond, North Yorkshire, augmenting a £10 million property portfolio (metropolitan digs in London – a Kensington mews house, a flat on Old Brompton Road – and a place in California) with a £1.5 million Georgian manor in Yorkshire set across 12 acres, including an ornamental lake. Here, he now entertains the constituency membership with lavish summer parties at which uniformed staff serve champagne and canapés. He has been repeatedly dubbed by newspapers the ‘Maharajah of the Yorkshire Dales’.
The general public know less about those details. Nonetheless, Rishi Sunak has become a household name:
In a swift few years, Sunak has become known as many things: Dishy Rishi to the tabloids; one of the richest MPs in Westminster; the second-youngest-ever chancellor of the exchequer, presiding over a £350 billion package to boost the economy (the largest ever recorded in peacetime); and a former hedge funder whose profile has risen faster than stocks in a vaccine manufacturer.
However dazzling all of this is now, things were very different when Sunak entered Winchester College as an adolescent:
… Winchester would come at a price for the Sunaks. No sooner was he accepted than Rishi’s good fortune immediately foundered: he missed out on the expected scholarship. Desperate not to let the opportunity go to waste, his parents decided to take on the high fees themselves, picking up extra work and making what the chancellor has called considerable ‘sacrifices’. His brother would later follow.
One of his classmates discussed Sunak and described Winchester in the mid- to late 1990s:
Tim Johnson, now a lawyer, was in the boarding house next door. ‘Rishi was a good chap, in boarding-school idiom,’ he recalled. Sunak, he said, was a ‘reasonable cricketer’, who stood out in friendliness; and he was a solid, but never number one, student. ‘Rishi was always expected to do something,’ Johnson remembered. But exactly what, beyond Winchester, was vague. ‘He was always expected to be head boy as he was clever enough, reasonable enough and well behaved enough.’ This became Sunak’s thing – hard work and attainment, becoming the first Winchester head of school from an Indian background.
Sunak was different to other sixth formers in Winchester: a lifelong nondrinker, he wasn’t distracted by the allure of the pub. But there was something else that marked him out from the herd. He was a conservative in every sense: not only in his outlook and demeanour but in his religious attitudes, too – a practising Hindu who avoided beef. At school, where few boys were political, Sunak was clearly ‘associated with the Tories’, said Johnson. It was 1997, The Chemical Brothers were topping the charts and the mood was rebellious. Counterculture, New Labour and ripped jeans were in; the Conservatives were out. ‘That wasn’t his intellectual jam. Rishi didn’t play that game,’ Johnson explained.
‘Everyone was chipper about it when Blair won,’ Johnson said. But not Rishi. His family’s story was closer to Margaret Thatcher’s than that of his bourgeois Labourite classmates. Watching the early results of the landslide on election night 1997, Sunak sat down to write a gloomy article for the school magazine, The Wykehamist, lamenting the news. His main complaint: Europe. ‘He revels in the label of a patriot,’ he complained of Tony Blair, ‘but has plans for the possible break-up of the United Kingdom and membership of an eventual European Superstate.’ The seeds of Brexit were already in his mind.
‘Already,’ fretted Sunak, ‘the New Labour rhetoric sounds worryingly pro-European and avid pro-Europeans are being sent to Brussels’ …
Later, at Oxford, Sunak had a low profile, unlike his predecessor as MP, William Hague:
He was nothing like the young William Hague, who arrived at Oxford fêted and almost a Tory celebrity, or the young Boris Johnson, the blond beast who tore apart the Oxford Union. At Oxford, Sunak was a nobody, much like Tony Blair.
He continued to eschew strong drink:
Oxford acquaintances remember him as a nerdy teetotaller who was ‘just very clearly going into business’. He would ‘make this big thing’ out of drinking Coke in the pub. ‘Rishi was unknown to the student politicians, that gossipy overlapping world, who all knew each other,’ said Marcus Walker, then-president of the Oxford University Conservative Association, now a clergyman. Sunak was never a member.
It is hard to remember how irrelevant and demoralised Tory circles felt after 1997, but some do recall Sunak as a ‘Thatcherite’ and ‘Eurosceptic’. ‘That was absolutely par for the course,’ said Walker. ‘If you were still a Tory after 1997, you were a Eurosceptic. That was all you had left.’
Nevertheless, Sunak did develop a network from his Winchester College and Oxford days. Graduates from Winchester are called Old Wykehamists:
These days, socially, Sunak has been placed by some in Westminster’s Spectator set. He was best man to his lifelong friend and fellow Old Wykehamist James Forsyth, political editor of The Spectator, at Forsyth’s politician-studded wedding in 2011, to Allegra Stratton, the national editor at ITV News – and gave what one guest recalled was ‘one of the most touching best man’s speeches I’ve ever heard’. (In fact, Stratton has recently announced she’s leaving ITV News for a job with Sunak at the Treasury. Some have seen this as very Cameron-esque in its ‘chumocracy’.)
Allegra Stratton, also a good friend of ITV’s Robert Peston, now works for Boris Johnson as his notional press secretary, although she has not yet begun to give press briefings, probably because of coronavirus.
Imagine the son of immigrants having ties to Britain’s two oldest — ancient — magazines: The Spectator and Tatler. Wow.
Tatler‘s Ben Judah also spoke with people who had worked with Sunak during his hedge fund days. They painted a similar character portrait of the Chancellor:
After two years in California completing a CV-topping MBA, he returned to London and Mayfair in 2006, where a new type of boutique finance was booming: hedge funds. He was hired by Sir Chris Hohn at The Children’s Investment Fund (TCI). It was a dream job: a big role at an activist firm off Berkeley Square at the peak of their fame. ‘He appears to have been trusted,’ said a source. Indeed, Sunak was made a partner two years later. Contemporaries remember him ever-ready to meet and greet; a mixture of a junior, deputy and a bag carrier; the perfect foil to Hohn’s bolshy swagger. ‘Ridiculously nice.’ ‘Affable.’ ‘Approachable.’ ‘Charming.’ These are the words that come up again and again among Mayfair types who knew Sunak. The charm was of a particular kind: ‘There are two kinds of people at hedge funds,’ said one source. ‘Handsome and thin smooth-talkers who are always on the phone or going out to lunch with clients, getting them to part with their money. And then quants in the back room with their shirts buttoned up badly.’
Sunak was one of the smooth-talkers, his charm honed on calls to investors, getting them on board with whatever drastic moves the fund wanted to make. The kind of charm that prizes clarity and persuades people to part with their money. It worked: but hedge-fund charm is designed to hide as much as it reveals. The atmosphere at TCI was buccaneering and bold; it both led and profited from a controversial banking raid that eventually meant a £45.5 billion public bailout of the Royal Bank of Scotland. (The Treasury and TCI say Sunak was not involved in the deal.) He left when TCI split in 2009, and joined the breakaway hedge fund Theleme Partners. His new firm’s reputation took a knock when its founder was revealed to have used a notorious tax avoidance scheme. The Labour Party researched Sunak’s past during the 2019 election. ‘But he was too little known for us to use it,’ said one source …
His reasons for entering Parliament are equally obscure. Those who know him have different opinions as to why. One thing that everyone agrees on is his penchant for order:
Many in Westminster see his motivation as status. ‘He’s not an ideologue,’ said one Tory source. ‘He wanted to enter politics in that old-fashioned way, because it was seen as the good thing to do.’ Good, as in socially ambitious. Whether that’s true is another matter, because first came a stint at Policy Exchange, leading a unit researching black and minority ethnic attitudes. The scruffy but influential Conservative think tank world is seen as a de facto holding pen for future special advisers, but it was nonetheless an unexpectedly technical way into Westminster for someone with means.
Sunak quickly made an impression. ‘He’s got that Blair-like ability to hold your eye,’ says Nick Faith, who worked with him there. Sunak cut a snappy figure amid slovenly suits. ‘He’s into his clothing.’ His is not the fusty establishment Rees-Mogg or Nicholas Soames style, but more the wiry Emmanuel Macron look. Everything Sunak wears, many remarked, is immaculate, even at the end of a Treasury work day, and fits perfectly. Faith says that ‘everything, from how Rishi dresses to how he structures his life, is very well organised’. Sunak’s elegant house in London, with a touch of Indian decor, reflects that. ‘Nothing is out of place. For someone with two small kids, that’s quite an achievement.’
Having learned from his background in finance, Sunak also knows how and when to place his bets:
‘His mind works in Excel,’ said one City contemporary. But like all hedge funders, it also works in bets: and the two biggest bets that Sunak has made in his career have paid off spectacularly – Brexit and Boris. David Cameron knew the gravity of his predicament when Sunak came out for Leave. ‘If we’ve lost Rishi, we’ve lost the future of the party,’ he reportedly said. The same thing played out in reverse in June 2019 when Sunak came out for Boris in The Times with two other MPs during the party leadership elections. This was widely seen in Westminster as a decisive turning point: the one where Johnson won over ‘the sensibles’ and pivoted the backbenchers. The PM seems to agree: all three have been handsomely rewarded.
In Parliament, he keeps a low profile but, to those who know him, is loyal:
‘He’s unknown in parliament,’ said one MP. ‘He doesn’t play the parliamentary game at all.’ Tory Remainers are sceptical of him. ‘It’s Star Wars,’ said one MP, referring to the chancellor’s strange and classically ‘geek-chic’ hobby for minutely detailed models of spaceships and video games. ‘Most of his political philosophy comes out of the Star Wars trade wars that are about the independence of various kingdoms from the Empire. He’s not someone intellectual.’ Loyalty has been his strongest suit. Sunak is a No 10 man. ‘He’s a grown-up,’ said one MP. ‘The only grown-up in Downing Street, despite him being 20 years younger than them.’
… At the height of tensions over Brexit last year, he was cheerfully going around Westminster saying he would back ‘no deal’ if push came to shove. He struck the right note, in the right place, at the right time. Tensions between Boris Johnson and Sajid Javid’s teams exploded in February, when the then-chancellor resigned after refusing to fire his own special advisers and submit to an unprecedented joint team with Downing Street, effectively under the stewardship of Dominic Cummings. It was Sunak, with high skills and no clear agenda or faction behind him in parliament, whom Downing Street turned to. He quickly agreed to the joint team, once again becoming the perfect foil for an outsized boss.
Even now, it’s still too early to say whether Rishi Sunak will become a future leader of the Conservative Party and, as such, a possible prime minister. A week is a long time in politics.
When Boris’s erstwhile special adviser Dominic Cummings broke coronavirus rules in travelling from London to Durham and back during Boris’s time in hospital, Sunak tried to calm the ever-turbulent waters surrounding Cummings, who was never popular with the Remainer media. He tweeted this after Cummings’s lengthy press conference in May:
In June, Sunak was tactful about the reopening of shops and businesses in Britain after the first coronavirus lockdown:
He also warned that his generous financial package could not go on indefinitely:
A few weeks later, in early July, pubs were allowed to reopen:
The Government launched the Enjoy Summer Safely campaign. Pictured below is Piccadilly Circus:
On July 8, he issued a Summer Economic Update, with financial help continuing (more here):
This included the launch of his Eat Out To Help Out plan, which lasted to the end of August:
A lot of Labour MPs didn’t like the plan. I don’t know why. Leftists own restaurants, too.
He cut VAT for the hospitality industry, too.
He also issued a detailed jobs plan, including an apprentice scheme:
Some men in the media were taking a shine to Dishy Rishi, including the leftist Owen Jones of The Guardian and Channel 5’s Jeremy Vine:
At that time, the attention being given to Sunak and Boris Johnson got the better of Conservative MP Caroline Dineage, a Culture minister, who was questioned on masks, which were strongly suggested (mandatory only on public transport) but still optional in what now look like heady days. This was from a BBC interview:
… asked why the Prime Minister and Chancellor Rishi Sunak had not worn one in public, she snapped: “You’d have to ask the Prime Minister and the Chancellor that, with respect.
“But it is something that is advised and we keep it under review.”
At the end of September 2020, the coronavirus crisis dragged on. Talk intensified about a winter lockdown.
On September 24, Sunak issued a Winter Economy Plan, about which I wrote at the time. When he presented it in the House of Commons, he advised all MPs to live ‘without fear’.
By October 6, Sunak was being blamed for an uptick in coronavirus ‘cases’ (positive test results, not necessarily hospital admissions) for the Eat Out to Help Out scheme:
A US study, which did not cover Britain, showed that hospitality venues were shown to be responsible. However, the study did not cover workplaces or hospitals. Nonetheless, it is still a contentious point even to this day.
The Sun‘s Harry Cole rightly, in my opinion, defended the Chancellor’s restaurant promotion.
Then talk of hospitality curfews emerged. Fellow Conservative MP Matt Vickers defended the Chancellor’s Eat Out to Help Out programme, which had come to an end five weeks earlier.
The calls for a winter lockdown grew. The Chancellor rightly opposed them:
By then, more areas of England had moved into tiers, indicating more coronavirus cases. Sunak increased financial support to those cities and counties. He also offered more help to businesses, including the self-employed.
By November, some thought a storm was truly brewing between Boris and Rishi. Despite all the talk from the Government about people being able to meet loved ones at Christmas — for the first time in months, for many — a pessimistic undercurrent, which turned out to be accurate, seemed to be part of every news cycle.
Rumours circulated that Sunak was ready to resign. However, on November 1, the Daily Mail reported:
A source said there was a ‘collective decision’ to back a second lockdown, and that Mr Sunak ‘accepted it’ – and he did not threaten to resign, as some whispers around Westminster were suggesting yesterday.
The November lockdown was supposed to prevent a Christmas lockdown, but that was not to be. There was a brief re-opening before Christmas, and on December 19, the hammer fell once more.
Interestingly, the minority MPs in Cabinet shared Sunak’s concerns.
By the middle of December, Sunak was clearly worried about how long the borrowing could go on. On Saturday, December 19, the day when Boris announced Christmas was cancelled, The Spectator reported what the Chancellor said about borrowing and quantitative easing (QE):
‘Are you or anyone else going to guarantee me that, for the duration of this parliament, rates might not go back to 1 per cent?’ he asks, pointing out that this almost happened in March, before the Bank of England started printing money to bring rates back down. ‘There is this very large QE thing that’s going on. No one has done that before. There are plenty of smart investors who are also thinking about the risks of inflation over the next 12 months. Because we are now so levered, small changes have huge cash implications. If I have to come up with £10-£20 billion a year in a few years’ time because things have changed — well, that’s a lot of money.’
To Sunak, it’s not just an economic problem but a political one. ‘If we [Tories] think borrowing is the answer to everything, that debt rising is fine, then there’s not much difference between us and the Labour party,’ he says.
The media criticised him for going to his constituency of Richmond for Christmas. To be fair, he did work while he was there, visiting a local hospital and a vaccine centre. He did not rush back to London.
On February 3, 2021, Sunak rightly accused scientists advising the Government of shifting the goalposts regarding lockdown:
This might be causing a rift in Boris’s Cabinet:
On a brighter note, Time magazine has included Rishi Sunak on its list of 100 ’emerging leaders’. On February 17, the Daily Mail reported:
Under the ‘leaders’ category, Chancellor Rishi Sunak landed a spot on the list, being described as the ‘benevolent face of the government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic’ by Times reporter Billy Perrigo.
The Chancellor’s profile piece discussed the furlough scheme, describing how he approved ‘large handouts’ for people whose jobs had been affected by coronavirus.
The piece also paid respect to Sunak’s Eat Out to Help Out scheme, which the magazine described as an attempt to ‘revive the economy’ by subsidizing dining out at restaurants.
Although his profile acknowledges that Sunak bears more responsibility than most for his calls to ease lockdown restrictions, Time’s profile for the Chancellor admits he has earned himself a ‘legion of fans’.
Sunak’s accompanying profile points to a YouGov poll showing him to be the nation’s most popular politician and even tips him to be the bookmakers’ favourite as the next Prime Minister.
Again, a week is a long time in politics. We shall see about the future as and when it happens.
For now, Sunak is focussing on the budget, to be delivered on March 3. He is asking industry leaders for their thoughts.
Michelin-starred chef Gordon Ramsay was one of those leaders:
If Rishi Sunak ever tires of being an MP or Chancellor, a job in media awaits.
He is an excellent interviewer and researched Gordon Ramsay well. The 15-minute video is worth watching.
The list of minority Conservative MPs continues. All being well, more tomorrow.
They’re mellowing with age, and with age they are acquiring wisdom.
That’s right — two of the enfants terrible of haute cuisine, Gordon Ramsay and Marco Pierre White (pictured, left and right).
Wouldn’t it be great of more of our bishops had their spirit and drive? Their recent series, now on in the UK, show a real insight in helping people get to know themselves and deliver a sound plate of food. Spiritually translated, that’s providing guidance based on Scripture and encouraging priests to return our church services to the mysterium tremendum.
Gordon doesn’t mess about in Kitchen Nightmares USA (Ch 4). Whereas he was a bit of a Sweary Mary in his earlier series, he now takes more time to see what motivates people and why their restaurants are failing. He confronts the restauranteurs: ‘What was that about? What were you thinking, huh?’ Gordon knows that in order to run a good restaurant you need responsible management, a spotless kitchen and good food simply prepared. Similarly, our bishops need to be telling our priests to spiritually feed and inspire us for the week ahead. This Church of Gaia beeswax has got to go.
Marco Pierre White has an uncanny way of showing his authority and expressing a genuine interest in the celebrity ‘chefs’ participating in Hell’s Kitchen (ITV1). Although ineffably masculine, Marco has a bit of the traditional nun about him: he’s 10 steps ahead of them, speaks in a measured way and gets them thinking he has eyes in the back of his head. And he’s full of pithy sayings based on personal experience: ‘Never let your emotions make your decisions’. Even the celebs who admit to having ‘a problem being told what to do’ take to him instantly. Marco’s daily challenges, he says, ‘tell me about who you [celebs] are’. Fascinating! Wouldn’t it would be great having bishops who knew who they were and could, in turn, bring out the best in priests? Strong bishops result in strong priests. Strong priests bring about firm believers.
Food reality shows probably show up on few bishops’ telly lists. Pity. They’re missing out. Meanwhile, the rest of us can only dream of the restoration of a stronger, more vibrant Church.
Churchmouse Campanologist 