I hoped that we would soon see the back of Jamie Oliver, once a ubiquitous presence on television, as his youthful Golden Labrador-ish appeal waned and his mouth increasingly looked like something you’d find on the end of a fishing rod. But regrettably, like many of the cor blimey pretend meritocrats of his era – from David Beckham to Jonathan Ross – he has proved as determined to hold on to his place on the dung heap of fortune as any old landed toff. It seems the ceaselessly acquisitive Oliver clan want some more of whatever pie is being divided. Is the world ready for Buddy, his 12-year-old son, who has just been awarded his own BBC cooking show?
For a man whose USP was being driven by concern for poor children, this is a grotesque state of affairs
We’ve been here before when it comes to befuddled nepo babies crashing and burning among the Le Creuset cookware; two years ago the oldest of the Beckham brats had his own, mercifully discontinued, TV show Cookin’ With Brooklyn. The eight-minute show required a crew of 62 to help make a fish-finger sandwich, to the tune of £74,000. Oliver may be hoping that because his son is still a child, he will avoid the brickbats the bemused Brooklyn received. This is a crafty new development in the protection and promotion of nepo babies; Victoria Beckham trademarked her daughter Harper Seven’s name when she was just five while Gordon Ramsay’s daughter Matilda started her BBC TV show – featuring three of her siblings – when she was only 13.
But though it’s somewhat sickening to see a privileged pre-teen given his own television show by a painfully right-on state broadcasting corporation principally because his father is famous, there’s no way in a million years I could ever garner the same level of contempt for him as I have for his dear old dad, who technically made it on merit. I’ve loathed Jamie Oliver for a long time, and my loathing has grown more nuanced and profound over the years. I used to despise him for claiming that junk food rots young brains while admitting that he had never read a book until the age of 38. I despised him for criticising British youth – ‘I’m embarrassed to look at British kids, I’ve got bulletproof Polish and Lithuanians who work hard,’ he once said, adding that they should be expected to ‘knock out seven 18-hour days in a row’. Those rotten chavs, refusing to work all hours for a few quid, they’ll be wanting toilet breaks next; thank goodness for overworked and underpaid foreign labour.
These were obviously the words of someone very keen on money. But since those innocent days, Oliver has racked up such an empire of financial self-interest – while masquerading as one of the good guys – I feel that I was only getting started with my contempt back in the 20th century. The Times informed us recently that Oliver and his wife made £7 million in dividends during the collapse of his Italian restaurant chain four years ago. ‘The past few months have been the most disappointing of my life,’ he pouted at the time. Not half as disappointing as it was for his creditors ‘including dozens of small suppliers, who had been left out of pocket, some of them into the hundreds of thousands of pounds. The restaurants collapsed with debts of £83 million, which included £21 million in debts to food producers and councils.’ One of them, Stuart Barden, said of Oliver Snr: ‘I hate the man with a passion… we were £48,000 out of pocket. He shut up shop and left – then cried in the newspapers… We could never recoup that… That he’s paying himself this now is an absolute joke.’
As with all narcissists, nothing is ever Oliver’s fault. Forever playing the noble victim, he once put criticism down to the fact that ‘part of it is because I’m from Essex, and whether colour or race or religion, there’s always prejudice, right?’ Some in the company blamed his sister’s husband for the failure of Jamie’s Italian – maybe next time hire someone on the basis of their ability, rather than their connection to your family, or would that flout the nepotistic code? – but it was obviously down to the vile food. Oliver defended his brother-in-law and may well have been ignorant of some of the business decisions but he would certainly have approved all the recipes; I’m sure he was thinking that us plebs would be too awed by his celebrity name to notice if he served substandard food at extortionate prices. It’s simply a display of contempt at every level: contempt for his customers, contempt for his creditors, contempt even for cookery.
But it gets worse. His business defaulted on more than £1.3 million that was owed to local councils; £55,000 to Tower Hamlets, £108,000 to Liverpool, £90,000 to Manchester and £80,000 to Newham. One of the most sickening aspects of Oliver’s rise was the contempt he poured on the impoverished mothers who handed ‘bad’ food to their children after the school lunch menu was decimated in his TV show Jamie’s School Dinners. This is a man who has a reported net worth of £240 million but who allowed his business to wriggle out of a debt of £80,000 to a neighbourhood where half of all children live in poverty and which has seen 13 of its 18 youth centres close over the last decade due to budget cuts. It is greed verging on the surreal.
No wonder a local councillor, Joshua Garfield, felt moved last year to say that: ‘Jamie Oliver has spent his career campaigning admirably on healthy food for children and against food poverty; he knows the value of childhood health and nutrition. In Newham, we fund free school meals for children in the face of devastating funding cuts to local government. Mr Oliver will appreciate how important business rates are to fill the gap left by the government to fund vital public services and tackle food poverty. I hope he’ll see to it personally that these bills are paid.’
For a man whose USP was being driven by concern for poor children, this is a grotesque state of affairs; let the malnourished kids go down the dumper – so long as there’s a limitless amount for the golden children of the rich and famous, such as his own. As for the next generation of bright, talented working-class kids who won’t get a break because their parents aren’t rich/famous/already in the racket, why on earth should they keep themselves fit and healthy to live a long life of frustration and thwarted potential? Let them eat all the cake they like.
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