Sunday Mercury showbiz editor clashed with Gordon Ramsay

Jun 14 2009 Sunday Mercury

With the interview over, Gordon stood up and thanked me graciously for my time. He helped me put my coat on and I skipped back to the office to tell all my colleagues what a charming man he was.

So it was with some surprise that I received a call from a friend who told me that Gordon wasn’t quite so charming after all.

Apparently my friend had witnessed Gordon using my interview for the basis of a speech he’d given at a dinner at the hotel.

With perfect comic timing he’d relayed how a reporter from ‘a tin-pot paper that sells about 72 copies somewhere off the M6’ had turned up and asked him how to make the perfect naan bread.

“I dunno.” He claimed to have replied. “Go off and ask f***ing Madhur Jaffrey.”

My editor was unsurprisingly not impressed and promptly spiked the double-page spread we’d been planning to run to promote Ramsay’s book.

But the furore was far from over. Somehow a newspaper diary column heard about it and called me up for quotes. On my editor’s instruction I said nothing, but it turned out Gordon still had plenty more to say.

A few days later the story ran in a national paper with Gordon unleashing more venom against me for my alleged interviewing faux pas.

When asked about the incident at the launch of Claridges, he reportedly spat: “She asked ludicrous and pathetic questions. It was like getting Michael Schumacher to drive a Smart car.”

He also claimed my editor had rung up and left a ‘sh***ty message’ on his answering machine – a fact that was news to all of us.

“I phoned him back and told him that the only Mercury I’d ever heard of was Freddie, and he died five years ago,” he quipped distastefully.

Unsurprisingly the whole thing left me feeling upset. What had I really done to warrant such wrath? I was also bemused.

Why on earth would someone as ­famous as Ramsay feel the need to take such a cheap shot at a ­nobody like me?

Over the following years as news stories about foul-mouthed Ramsay came and went it was obvious that I would be one of many to fall victim to Gordon’s loaded outbursts.

I would never willingly watch his shows but if I caught a glimpse when my housemate tuned in it would normally leave a bad taste in my mouth.

While he can be quick-witted, watching him repeatedly bawling and screaming at undeserving individuals is pretty unpleasant.

In Gordon’s world it is clearly a case of every man for himself. If you have to chew up and spit out a few lesser mortals along the way then so be it.

I’ve always found it depressing that someone that vitriolic could be so universally loved.

So it was with some amusement that I read the Australian Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, had referred to Gordon as a new kind of lowlife.

Some might say it’s a little harsh but perhaps it’s a case of Gordon finally getting his ‘just desserts’.

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