Nigella lawson

It is the early hours of the morning and an email drops into my inbox. Lacking any kind of willpower, I open it. Now I’m wide awake. Because this isn’t the usual PR slop that starts my days. It’s a tip-off. A big one. A reader has discovered something about a company and they are urging me – me! – to investigate. Adrenaline surges. This must be what it felt like to be Woodward and Bernstein. Only my informant is pointing me in a slightly different direction. Their intel is on Gentleman’s Relish: the incredibly niche spread is disappearing from our shelves. It has been available in the House of Lords dining rooms but for how much longer? Online supermarkets and delis are showing it as out of stock. What is going on?

The young nannies arriving for their morning lectures at Norland College in Bath make quite a sight. Although the road is empty, they bank up along the pavement waiting for the lights to change. They are in their winter uniform of brown hat and gloves, hair in a neat bun; some push old-fashioned Silver Cross prams with plastic babies in them. Eventually the green man appears and the nannies cross. These girls look as if they are being trained for a bygone era — and that is certainly part of their appeal — but they are well prepared for modern life. Founded in London in 1892, Norland College made its name providing nannies for British aristocrats and royals.

Way back in the late 1990s, I spent a lot of time in court. What happened, see, was that in the wee small hours of a drunken Edinburgh morning, my friend Jonny and I took a shortcut home through the disused railway tunnel that runs under Holyrood Park. I’d been through it many times, being enraptured with the magic of abandoned urban spaces and, perhaps more to the point, stupid, but never before had it contained a gang of pissed-up youths on a rampage. This time it did, and they put us in hospital. Various arrests followed pretty swiftly.

We're putting the new Spectator to press this morning, and we have an interesting reader's letter from Charles Saatchi. It's addressed to Taki, as opposed to the editor, and takes issue with his disobliging references last week. He has this to say: 'Dear Ms Taki [sic], Although the Spectator is a lovely read, I always skip your column, I'm afraid. I am simply not interested in your social life.  I know that you delight in telling readers that your friends of Prussian nobility find you hilariously entertaining company at their swanky Europoncy parties. But it was very hapless of you to spring to Nigella's defence last week, as she always found you toe-curlingly vile, and would have been aghast at having you as her valiant supporter.

‘Is anyone here even remotely shocked that Nigella Lawson has done cocaine?’ I asked. Everyone shook their heads. Well of course they did: it was the after-show drinks in the green room at a BBC studio. ‘So why is it being reported in the media as if it were some amazingly big deal?’ No one knew the answer to that one. Everyone present had either tried Class As or been to numerous parties where they were about the only ones there who hadn’t taken Class As. Yet here we were, gossiping about the latest revelations from the Nigella court case for all the world as if they mattered. ‘One Direction are infatuated with Nigella Lawson and paid her a million pounds to have a six-some with her, in a giant tub of her How To Eat classic pea risotto.

Allegations that Nigella Lawson used cocaine and prescription drugs on a habitual basis have emerged in court today after the trial judge lifted a reporting restriction. Lawson's former personal assistants Francesca and Elisabetta Grillo are accused of fraud by Charles Saatchi, Lawson's former husband. The court heard, in pre-trial hearings, evidence for the defence which apparently shows that Saatchi accepts the Grillo sisters' argument that Lawson had allowed them to spend more than £300,000 on the proviso that they did not divulge details of her drug use to him.