Jamie Oliver “Jools is my rock”

The last time I spoke to Jamie Oliver he was riding into battle with the Aussie government, a veritable knight on a white charger hoping to persuade our PM to implement a tax on sugar. His schedule as he dashed between London, Sydney and Melbourne was exhausting, his resolve unflinching. Today life couldn’t be more different, that peripatetic existence has been arrested and we are talking on Zoom, with Jamie at home somewhat dazed after an extraordinary 18 months. “COVID sent us all into meltdown,” he says. “We’d never seen governments or anything operate like this ... But I think in the years that follow we will all be talking about things that happened that we’re grateful for amongst the darkness.”

Along with the rest of Britain, Jamie was plunged into a lengthy lockdown and true to form his immediate reaction was to man the barricades. Jamie was busy filming when the drawbridge was pulled up and he seized the day to help. “Basically, I never went home. When we were told we were going into lockdown on Monday I didn’t go home on the Friday. I looked at the crew that I happened by luck to be working with and I said, ‘We’re in a bubble. Are we all in or do you want to go home?’ And they all said, ‘We’re in!’.

“It wasn’t ‘in’ for me; it was ‘in’ for the country and we went straight into public service mode. We could