Nigella is in the papers again. Now watch the British press lose its collective mind.
The news that the habitually mononymic food guru is to replace Prue Leith on The Great British Bake Off sent male and female journos equally crackers.
“Nigella of the moist baps is joining as a judge and it is an inspired appointment,” Carol Midgley quivered in the Times. “Imagine serving her a collapsed soufflé,” Stuart Heritage wrote in the Guardian. “Imagine the hurt and disappointment in her eyes.”
It wasn’t just the British. The story drew headlines in the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times.
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The phrase “national treasure” (or “international treasure”, for that matter) doesn’t quite cover it. This is more as if some lofty deity had descended from the heavens to redeem the lost and the dissolute with her sacred double entendres.
Too much? Even for hyperbolic analogy? Nigella Lawson chose the title How to be a Domestic Goddess for her second book. “Some people did take the domestic-goddess title literally rather than ironically,” she later explained.
Fair enough. But it takes a certain person to employ that particular irony. One cannot imagine Delia Smith claiming divine status, even in jest. For all her rumoured niceness (and shyness), Nigella is aware of the fragrant glamour that follows her from garlic press to bamboo steamer.
Still, a better analogy is probably with a once all-conquering soccer team, now in danger of relegation, getting hold of a star striker at the height of their talents. As if Kylian Mbappé had just signed for Leeds United.
[ Patrick Freyne: Nigella Lawson is not a chef, she's a food playwrightOpens in new window ]
The Great British Bake Off, though still a charmer, commands nothing like the attention it once did. When Nadiya Hussain won, in 2015, it was front-page news. The following year’s series, the last on the BBC, saw ratings peak at close to 15 million.
Channel 4, which then took over, was sufficiently respectful of the property to make no changes bar replacing personnel who had jumped ship. Leith came in for Mary Berry. Noel Fielding and Sandi Toksvig came in for Mel Perkins and Sue Giedroyc.
The show still does well enough by the channel’s standards – streaming ratings are strong, and the pandemic-year outing was a sensation – but the live figures for the 2025 season were little more than half what The Great British Bake Off was scoring a decade ago.
We can see what is in it for the programme. The arrival of Nigella has brought oodles of attention, and there is little doubt that figures will soar when the series returns in the autumn. But what’s in it for the Domestic Goddess?
This cosy little cooking show once made stars of its judges. Few had heard of Mary Berry or Paul Hollywood when they arrived for the first series, in 2010. Now the situation is reversed. An Athena of gastronomical innuendo goes among mortals to grant, well, not exactly eternal life, but a few more years in prime time anyway.
Nigella certainly did a good job of appearing excited in the aftermath of the announcement. “I’m uncharacteristically rather lost for words right now,” she said. “The Great British Bake Off is more than a television programme, it’s a national treasure.”
I think she means it. For all the diminished ratings, The Great British Bake Off remains as fundamentally British a televisual institution as Blue Peter, Dad’s Army and Doctor Who. More than that. It is a fundamentally English institution, and so is its latest judge.
Nigella Lawson arrived in the world to enormous privilege. Her father, Nigel Lawson, became Margaret Thatcher’s chancellor of the exchequer. Her mother, Vanessa Salmon, was heir to the J Lyons restaurant fortune. Private school led on to Oxford and, following graduation, an invitation to write for the Spectator.
In short, she had all the superficial qualifications to become a national bete noire. Just look how people enjoying ragging the conspicuously posh Emerald Fennell, director of the upcoming “Wuthering Heights” (her inverted commas).
It is a small miracle that Nigella has, despite all those advantages, managed to endear herself to so many. It helps that she is funny. It helps that she is eccentric. It helps that she is self-deprecating. It helps that the recipes work so well.
Her undeniably sleek appearance – at 66, if she’ll forgive me – cannot be excised from the equation. Most important is that overall sense of her being the pal you’d invite around both in grave crises and at times of celebration.
Rarely has there been a better example of the perfect candidate being selected for a high-profile media position. One can imagine finding, among the notes of a Bake Off meeting, the words: “We’ll never get NL, but it would do no harm to ask.”
Let’s hope the seemingly endless search for the next James Bond ends so well.
