Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall: Starmer isn't Left-wing enough

Telegraph

3 days ago

Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall is rummaging through his tomato plants, trying to find an edible cherry tomato.
'Here you are,' he says, possibly suppressing an inward sigh of relief, since I suspect being able to give visitors ripe fruit and veg from the vegetable gardens at his River Cottage café in east Devon is all part of the Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall show.
Fearnley-Whittingstall was once the feral-looking wild man of food TV, known for cooking and eating squirrels and even human placenta on shows like A Cook on the Wild Side and TV Dinners. These days, he's the spick-and-span face of healthy eating, proselytising on screen and in print about the goodness of fresh fruit and veg – ideally sourced straight from growers rather than supermarkets.
He radiates the virtues he preaches, thanks to a diet stuffed with nuts and plants as set out in his most recent book, How To Eat 30 Plants a Week; daily dips in his garden pond; and a life spent largely outdoors. He's 60 but looks 40, and is an indefatigably cheery sort, joking with the lunchtime crowd at his café – almost certainly locals popping in for broad bean pâté on sourdough while walking the dog.
We've met at River Cottage – the café, cookery school and farm shop he opened down the road in 2004, before moving it to its current spot on the ridge of a valley a couple of years later – to discuss More Than Food: a campaign encouraging people to shop at local farm shops, which Fearnley-Whittingstall supports as patron of the Farm Retail Association. The benefits of farm shops are well known: buying fresh produce directly helps struggling farmers and keeps money within the local community, encourages healthier eating, and fosters an understanding of where our food comes from – something a washed and peeled carrot shrink-wrapped in supermarket clingfilm can't hope to do.
Yet Fearnley-Whittingstall also recognises the arguments against them: too expensive, too middle class, and for many simply impractical. After all, not everyone has the luxury of planning their weekly meals around a Saturday morning trip to stock up on fresh courgettes at the market.
'I get that farm shops are not for everyone, but not everything I support has to be the solution for everyone and everything,' he says. 'But at the same time, I do meet people who are on a tight budget, who would still rather do their shopping at farmers' markets and buy local vegetables.'
Actually, he may be right – where I live, in a decidedly un-gentrified part of Tower Hamlets, there are at least three farmers' markets each week. Chalk it up to the trickle-down Fearnley-Whittingstall effect: since 1999, when he first began chronicling the art of self-sufficiency in Channel 4's Escape to River Cottage. Back then, he had recently left London with his French wife, Marie (a psychotherapist), and their four young children for a life in the country. Since then, he's played an indisputable role in the huge growth of plant-based eating, and has produced a remarkable 29 cookbooks on healthy food.
'It falls to the Government to look after the health of its population'
Now Fearnley-Whittingstall is calling on the Government to devote a substantial chunk of money to free school meals for all primary children, using freshly cooked local ingredients – an idea he agrees is not likely to be part of the beleaguered Rachel Reeves's autumn budget.
To be fair, Labour has recently committed to extending free school meals to all families on Universal Credit.
'It's great they've done this, but what would be completely transformative is to give free school meals of really good quality to all primary school kids,' he says, as we walk towards the neatly blooming vegetable patches that supply the café kitchens.
'There'll be a big cost but in 10 years time there'd be a much bigger saving in terms of the country's health if we put proper good real food in front of kids every school day. But it is hard for politicians to take a long term view. Instead you get governments nibbling at the edges, and with the last lot, not even doing that, to be honest.'
Except that when Jamie Oliver tried to improve school lunches in 2005, going to war on Turkey Twizzlers, parents were so angered at being told what was best for their children that they fed them chips through the school railings instead. Isn't it the case that eating habits aren't solved by celebrity chefs making children eat more cabbage, but are bound up in far more entrenched issues around class and a dislike of state interference?
'Actually, Oliver's campaign did quite a lot of good,' says Fearnley-Whittingstall. Indeed, Oliver continues to campaign against processed food in school dinners, and last year set up a Ministry of Food to teach 11- to 14-year-olds how to cook from scratch.
'But I do think it falls to the Government to look after the health of its population. You cannot say, 'We'll provide a health service, but we're not going to talk about food or try to influence people's choices because that would impinge on their freedom, and we're not a nanny state.' Since Covid, that doesn't stack up – if you can intervene in people's lives to the extent you did with lockdowns, telling them not to go to work because of a disease whizzing around the world, why can't you intervene in what's the single biggest health crisis facing our country?'
Fearnley-Whittingstall gave the Tories a bit of a kicking during their time in power, last year accusing then health secretary Victoria Atkins on BBC's Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg of doing 'next to nothing' to tackle obesity, arguing there were plenty of levers the government could pull to help. A few days later, Atkins told Politics Home that she didn't believe actions such as banning cartoons on sugary cereals were part of the answer.
He's been a Green Party supporter for decades, but spiritually he's more inclined towards Labour than the Tories. In light of the furore over the party's decision to make farms pay inheritance tax from 2026, how good a friend does he think Labour is proving to be to farmers?
'I don't consider myself a spokesman for small farms,' he says. 'But if you're a small farm, some form of direct retail is pretty much your only option to stay afloat. Not having to pay inheritance tax is exactly the kind of thing that might help you survive. On the other hand, massive arable farms ultimately owned by conglomerates shouldn't be getting quite such a break. But yes, farmers are under the cosh. Life is hard, and people are leaving the business. You can also see this in the sale of small farms that become part of bigger and bigger farms.'
What about Labour's plans for net zero which could see farmers forced to convert agricultural land into wild habitats: don't farmers feel threatened by this too?
'That's just political rhetoric. I don't think you hear many farmers worrying about that. Because actually plenty of renewables, particularly solar, are compatible with growing vegetables or grazing sheep underneath.'
Fearnley-Whittingstall first got a taste for the good life at six, when his parents – Robert, who worked in advertising and came from a landed gentry family, and Jane, a gardener and writer – moved from London to rent a farm in Gloucestershire.
'I got to ride on the combine harvester and got to feed the sheep in the winter. I thought it was just wonderful.'
He may not be a farmer, but his River Cottage business – which he established after cutting his teeth as a chef at the River Café in Hammersmith – runs like a smallholding. Yet he's also faced difficulties: there used to be three other River Cottage restaurants in the surrounding area, but Covid and rising costs put paid to those. Now everything is centred on this vertiginous piece of land with panoramic views of Dorset and east Devon.
The cost of living crisis is still having an impact. 'Like pretty much all hospitality businesses, we feel the effects of economic uncertainty and the increased cost of living,' he says. 'We are having to work harder to fill our courses and dining events, but so far we've had our best summer ever.'
It's also undeniably idyllic: he points out beehives tucked in the trees and introduces me to Lucille, a sow, and her frisky litter – most destined to become charcuterie sold in the café. Further down is the farmhouse where the cookery school is housed, and where guests can rent one of five bedrooms overlooking a delightful cottage garden, today bursting with purple cosmos. Technically, River Cottage is not Hugh and Marie's home, they live about a 15-minute drive away in a farmhouse where they raised Oscar, Freddy, Chloe and Louisa, but as far as the nation is concerned, the brand and Fearnley-Whittingstall's home life are virtually one and the same.
All the same, farming on TV is becoming a crowded field. Fearnley-Whittingstall has been a bit sniffy about Jeremy Clarkson in the past but today he is more mollifying. 'I haven't watched barely a minute of Clarkson's farm, but I would be silly if I hadn't noticed what positive things farmers say about him,' he says.
Has he met him? 'Yes, once or twice, and I find him extremely amenable and civil and fun. I probably should spend a bit of time seeing what he's up to.'
In truth, Fearnley-Whittingstall is probably too busy planning his next campaign to worry unduly about what Clarkson is up to. Having raised awareness of so many issues, it's hard to keep track. Alongside the River Cottage shows, he presents documentaries about animal welfare, the fishing industry, food waste, and Britain's weight crisis.
Another bête noire is the role of corporations in polluting rivers. Earlier this year, he called on Nando's to clean up its supply chains, arguing that intensive chicken farming near the River Wye was killing the river. The day before we met, Parisians were photographed happily splashing about in the Seine – something, says Fearnley-Whittingstall, most of us can only dream of in Britain, where, according to the River Trust, 75 per cent of rivers pose a significant risk to human health. He believes the only solution is renationalisation.
'I think that, after the last election, people expected Labour would stand up for nature. But banning bonuses [for the CEOs of polluting water companies, a recent Labour policy] is not the same as putting in hard legislation to clean up our rivers,' he says.
'The privatised water industry is practically white-collar crime. It's an algorithmic money-making machine where everything to do with clean rivers and healthy sewage systems comes second to how companies can milk the system.'
Nigel Farage's Reform Party has pledged to take water companies out of private ownership if they come to power. Yet Labour, says Hugh, doesn't have the guts to tackle it.
'They seem too terrified of being branded old-school socialists to renationalise. They're far too busy kowtowing, in a paranoid fashion, to every bit of noise Nigel Farage stirs up. Instead of simply saying, 'We don't agree with that.''
He agrees that, on the whole, the British government is culturally in thrall to large corporations. 'It's political cowardice. Particularly in the specific area of food policy, where the lobbying of the food companies to not be corrected or legislated has held sway.'
Fearnley-Whittingstall likes making a nuisance of himself. He relishes his image as a thorn in the side of the political establishment.
'Politicians see that they've got to look like they might do something. But they also know they can sit on their hands, because they know that once I've done a programme about fish [his 2011 documentary Fish Fight examined the parlous state of fish stocks in British waters], I'm probably not going to do another one for five years. So they can, oh, well, he's got away now, so as you were, lads.'
'I stand by everything I said about Gaza'
Yet recently, he's ventured into territories less obviously his bag. He has appeared several times on Laura Kuenssberg's TV show, but provoked audience ire by saying on a recent episode that the Israeli attacks on Gaza were 'catastrophic'.
'I was asked a direct question about the situation, and I brought up the issue of Gaza being in danger of falling out of that headlines,' he says.
'I stand by everything I said. But I think most people objected to the BBC booking me rather than my opinions. People said, 'well next time, let's have Nigella talk about the threat of North Korean nuclear power'. But I bet you Nigella would have some super smart things to say about that. So bring it on. I enjoy a bit of that cut and thrust.'
On a previous episode, he also spoke about the disgraced chef Gregg Wallace, saying that Wallace had crossed a line when he described those who had accused him of sexual harassment as 'middle class women of a certain age'.
(We are talking before the BBC's announcement that Wallace would not be returning to MasterChef after it upheld 45 of the 83 accusations against him; the investigation also exposed another MasterChef, John Torode, who was alleged to have used racist language, which Torode denies.)
Fearnley-Whittingstall argues that the reality TV format can be unforgiving.
'Everyone is highly scrutinised, and when somebody falls down, the press has a field day.' But despite the many scandals that have rocked the world of celebrity chefs, he doesn't think the industry itself promotes a particularly toxic culture.
'Although the world of food and restaurants is high octane, it's actually quite non-judgmental. Hospitality doesn't care where you went to school. Ironically.'
He says this because many people know he went to Eton, where he was a year above David Cameron and Boris Johnson. Years later, his cousin Sarah married Cameron's brother Alexander, who died in 2023 from cancer, but Fearnley-Whittingstall doesn't know Cameron personally.
'I don't have any social connections with the Cameron family. I have other friends who know him quite well, but he's not in my social group. Same goes for Boris, by the way, just in case that was your next question.'
He has spoken before about his conflicted feelings about public schools, telling Radio Three's Private Passions last year that he thought there is 'quite a dysfunctional thing going on with a small section of our society being educated in this extraordinarily elite way and then going on to hold so much sway.' Yet he also defended his time at Eton as being an 'extraordinary experience.'
Does he think private schools sometimes get a bit of an undeserved bad press? He laughs. 'I'm not over exercised about what press Eton or any other school gets, it doesn't worry me. I think they can defend themselves very well if they choose to.'
What about Labour's decision to impose VAT on fees?
'I am in favour of VAT on private school fees. It obviously makes it tough for some families with kids in private education. But private schools are businesses, mostly seeking to operate at a profit, and I think it's fair they contribute VAT like other businesses.
'But I've started to become aware of the way my years as a boarder [he boarded from the age of eight] have had an impact,' he adds. 'I was quite homesick, and I think that probably has had an influence, in the way that, as an adult, home is quite essential for me. I want it to feel a certain way, to know that it delivers comfort and safety.'
Does he think he consciously created River Cottage in the image of his own childhood, to give his children the very idyll he longed for during those long years at boarding school?
'We are trying to make something that's very special for our family, but it's not that I'm insisting or even hoping that my kids take the same thing from it that I did, because they're all going off in different directions.'
In fact, his eldest daughter Chloe, 29, whom he and Marie adopted at the age of eight after her BBC journalist mother, Kate Peyton, was shot dead in Mogadishu, is a chef. Meanwhile, 26-year-old Oscar is a boat captain, Freddie, 22, is studying film, and 15-year-old Louisa is still at school. 'But yes, it's important.'
What's it like when they're all at home – do they fight over the cooking?
'I've got much better at backing off, because they're essentially grown-ups now. In the past, they'd be like, 'I've got this.' And I'd say, 'No, you haven't quite got it.' Then they'd say, 'Get out my face. I'm cooking tonight.' We're past all that now, which is actually much more relaxing for me, because every single one of my kids is more than capable of doing a fantastic dinner for the whole family.'
He's an interesting mix – full of zeal, determined to make a difference, deeply passionate about the soil and, emotionally, quite straightforward. There are no obvious demons. 'I have a little black dog nipping at my ankles, a medium-sized grey dog sniffing at my crotch, and a very fast blonde dog running around in circles when we go for a walk, but they're real. There's no black dog on my back.'
But part of him remains that six-year-old boy. 'In my mind, my rural childhood has always resembled an adventure. And when I look at all this', he says, waving towards the garden, 'it still feels like it's an adventure to try and make a life here.'