Years — actually decades — ago, a gentleman from the British civil service, interviewing me as a potential candidate for a job in the European Commission, explained that ‘all the important decisions in Brussels are prepared by the chefs’. As he spoke, I had a vision of men in tall white hats stirring dishes on a large stove in the middle of the Berlaymont.
‘Chefs?’ I queried.
The man quickly explained that he meant the ‘chefs de cabinet’, the Commissioners’ aides, who basically ran the show while the great men had long lunches at expensive Brussels restaurants. Still, this vision of the all-powerful chef was a vivid one and it came back to me when I read of the preparations being made for next week’s Channel Four ‘television chef’ spectacular. Forget about poets being the ‘unacknowledged legislators of the world’. Today it is the chefs who are coming out of the kitchen into the heat of political controversy.
Not any old chefs, mind you. I barely know one end of an egg from another, but I am quite aware that these are the big boys. For most of next week, Channel Four is running programmes featuring some of the great ‘celebrity chefs’ of our time: Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Gordon Ramsay, Jamie Oliver and Heston Blumenthal. And they are coming together for a nakedly political objective.
Let me go back for a moment to Brussels, when I first arrived there in the early seventies. The United Kingdom, on entering the then EEC, had just given up its right to control its own living marine resources. Official documents subsequently released make it clear just how cynical the trade-off between UK fish and UK entry was. Since then, as far as the management of our fish stocks is concerned, it has been downhill all the way.
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