Soggy bottoms, stiff peaks, dribbling nozzles… tonight, the UK’s most suggestive television cook, Nigella Lawson, joins Channel 4’s Great British Bake Off, itself a case study in drip-feeding double entendre into primetime family TV. I’ve been looking forward to it since the announcement in January.
Lawson follows Mary Berry and Prue Leith into the tent as it enters its 17th series. She will appear alongside presenters Alison Hammond and Noel Fielding and co-judge Paul Hollywood, who coined the progression of female judges: “Dame, Dame, Queen.” Well quite.
As the peaches and cream reigning monarch of home baking, Lawson seems an apt choice for the GBBO role, a show which began on BBC in 2010. But, unlike Berry and Leith, Lawson’s background isn’t squeaky clean. She has lived her life in the spotlight but has always bounced back, from both poor ratings and public scandal. Perhaps that’s why she’ll perform well in the tent, offering a steady hand to panicked contestants as they rescue wayward bakes.
While exceedingly posh and wealthy, with a fortune from her food career alone said to be around £15m, somehow the gossip and scandals over the years made us love her all the more. When her cocaine use was on splashed on the front pages – in December 2013 during the fraud trial of her former assistants – she, perhaps unwittingly, pioneered public vulnerability, a posture many now copy in an attempt to achieve relatability.
A domestic goddess? Sure, though unfortunately, a quarter of a century on, that moniker has been co-opted by and to describe women who pride themselves on domestic ability alone. In contrast, Lawson is a woman whose vast output reveals her as a professional workhorse. Just last week, in her monthly Financial Times column, she explained: “The title was meant to indicate a certain camp irony rather than a retrograde espousal of antifeminist beliefs, or manifestation of the tradwife avant la lettre, but hey ho.”
Hey ho, indeed. The ultimate comeback queen, Lawson seems ever ready to challenge the limitations of her own kitschness, breaking new ground at Christmas 2024 when she fronted the Greggs festive ad. Early Bake Off previews have leaned into this aspect of her appeal, with an ingredient called “sticky willy” making an appearance.
Lawson’s first book How to Eat came out in 1998, the year I left school. Over almost three decades of publishing cookbooks and fronting TV food shows, including How To Be a Domestic Goddess in 2000, the baking book that shaped her early identity, and her first TV series Nigella Bites (1999-2001), Lawson has feathered her nest as an enduringly likeable figure, full of ideas and enthusiasm and someone who, above all, enjoys eating.
To middle-class, working Gen X women, she became what Delia had offered baby boomers. But instead of occupying the role of no-nonsense teacher, Lawson took on a big sister persona, holding fans’ hands as they reproduced her blend of casual luxury, large helpings and fairy light-adorned dinner tables.
Lawson with her first husband, John Diamond, whom she met while working at The Sunday Times and married in 1992. Diamond died of throat cancer in 2001 (Photo: Dave Benett/Getty)She has since given us many more bestselling cookbooks and TV shows, from Nigella Feasts, Nigella Express and Nigella’s Christmas Kitchen, through to Nigellissima and Simply Nigella. There have been a few bombs along the way, notably a daytime chatshow in 2005.
At times, her coquettish persona has run the risk of dissolving into its own sauciness, but the high camp is eminently entertaining (her deliberately mispronouncing the word “microwave” fuelled an entire news cycle in 2020). In the Noughties, her TV career thrived alongside big name male chefs such as Heston Blumenthal and Gordon Ramsay. In comparison, her recipes stood out as a gift rather than a threat or a challenge.
Lawson has lived much of her life in the public eye. She is the daughter of the politician Nigel Lawson, Margaret Thatcher’s chancellor from 1983 to 1989, and the glamorous Vanessa Salmon, heiress to the J Lyons & Co catering fortune, a ballerina who gave up dancing at 19 to marry. Lawson has spoken of her tempestuous relationship with her mother, a depressive with eating disorders who would lash out physically and emotionally at her four children.
The family’s fame and fortune did not protect them from great tragedy. Salmon died of liver cancer at the age of 48 when Lawson was just 25. Eight years later her sister, Thomasina, died of breast cancer at 32. She also has an older brother, the journalist Dominic Lawson, casting director sister Horatia, who is six years younger, and half-siblings Tom and Emily. She has spoken of having a close relationship with her father until his death in 2023 at the age of 91, despite admitting voting against him in 1987, when he was chancellor.
Paul Hollywood, left, coined the progression of female judges: ‘Dame, Dame, Queen’ referencing Mary Berry, Prue Leith and now, Nigella Lawson, right (Photo: Patch Dolan)Lawson met her first husband John Diamond when they were both working at The Sunday Times, where she was appointed deputy literary editor at just 26. After a tumultuous time at school – she attended nine – she studied languages at Oxford before beginning her career in journalism, a period in which she did some food writing for The Spectator and Vogue.
Diamond and Lawson married in 1992 and had two children, Cosima and Bruno, now 32 and 30. But tragedy struck again and Diamond died of throat cancer in 2001, four years after his initial diagnosis. He chronicled his last months and life with Lawson in The Times.
Despite all this, she thrived professionally and in 2003, married art dealer Charles Saatchi. As her profile grew, so did media interest in her private life, which meant that a court case brought against their two personal assistants by Saatchi, alleging the women, Italian sisters Elisabetta and Francesca Grillo, had stolen from the couple by misusing credit cards, was reported with lascivious detail and a certain amount of glee in some quarters. Details about Lawson’s private life emerged, including use of cocaine and cannabis, that made front pages around the world.
The sisters’ defence was that the spending was hush money in a tacit agreement to keep schtum about Lawson’s behaviour. Lawson explained her drug use as a coping mechanism, rather than a habit or addiction, during her marriage to a “brilliant but brutal” man. Their relationship ended the summer before she took the witness stand, after Saatchi was photographed grabbing his wife by the neck outside a London restaurant.
Fans quickly turned out in support of the TV chef, using the hashtag #TeamNigella. While the Grillo sisters were acquitted, Lawson won the battle of hearts and minds. “We have won the court case but she definitely had the most support from the public,” Francesca told ITV’s This Morning after the trial. “She is well-loved and will always be loved.”
I have only met Lawson once. Thrilled to find myself opposite her at a work lunch, I had to hold back from asking personal questions as if I knew her. She talked about missing her father, her time in Australia where she has judged several cooking shows, and the brilliant book by a friend whose launch she was attending that night, who turned out to be Rachel Eliza Griffiths, Salman Rushdie’s wife. Persistently relatable, she confessed that sometimes she feels too tired to even chop an onion.
Lawson and her brother, Dominic, attending court in 2013 after Lawson and her husband Charles Saatchi’s personal assistants were accused of defrauding the couple of over £300,000 (Photo: Oli Scarff/Getty)I have heard many stories of her immense kindness to others in her field. On social media, she makes sure to champion others, regularly recommending fellow writers or attributing recipes to the people or cultures who introduced her to them. When Nathan Young set himself the challenge of cooking Lawson recipes every day for a year, she followed his journey and invited him to lunch on day 365.
I’m sure everyone has their favourite Nigella Lawson recipes. For me, they don’t seem show-offy, but the results tend to be worth shouting about. Is it tragic to admit that I bake my own birthday cake every year? Always Lawson’s chocolate guinness cake. And if you find yourself with a citrus or two to use up, her lemon risotto is alchemical.
For those of us who already know and love her, the anticipation of the queen of cupcake-orienting innuendo joining Bake Off with more sideways glances than a Benny Hill biopic is almost too much to bear. Let the show begin.
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