Gordon Ramsay

by Neil Simpson

  As Ronnie’s elder brother and childhood best friend, Gordon was the most involved in the younger man’s life. Trying to save Ronnie had become a secret obsession – something into which Gordon poured huge amounts of his time and thousands of pounds of his money over the years. But much of the time it felt as if it was all wasted effort. ‘It is the one thing I feel I have failed at,’ he said in 2000, when Ronnie was due in court in Bridgwater. But still he kept on trying, however ugly, depressing and threatening the task became.

  Over the years, looking after his brother took Gordon far from the professionalism of his business life and the glamour of his new show-business world. It took him into the secret, hidden underbelly of our big cities and small towns. And many times it made him physically sick with fear and depression. On one occasion, Gordon was persuaded to go with Ronnie to visit his dealers. Ronnie said that this was the one way he could break off his relationship with them, to see them in person and to tell them that he was getting clean, no longer using, no longer a customer to be fleeced and destroyed. But to do so he needed his brother’s support.

  ‘Ronnie said he wanted to stand in among the junkies to tell himself how strong he was. It was the biggest load of crap I have heard. He said, “I need to use it once more, to tell myself I don’t need to do it any more.” I felt like catching him by the scruff of the neck and giving him a good hiding.’ But instead Gordon decided to give his brother the benefit of one more doubt, and see if his strategy could work. The memories of what he saw that day have horrified him ever since.

  ‘The dealers have all got Rottweilers, three spy holes in their doors. They look like sacks of shit. The telly’s on, they’re wearing big white Puma trainers, not a speck on them. You’ve got to sit there: “How are you, mate?” when you just want to beat the crap out of them.’ On another, equally doomed occasion, Gordon says his car was bricked as he waited outside a dealer’s house while Ronnie tried to put another ultimatum to the people inside. ‘These drug guys are seriously dangerous people and I think they thought I was the police,’ he says.

  Professional counselling and therapy would be equally shocking for both brothers. Gordon enrolled Ronnie on courses at a variety of clinics over the years. And, when Ronnie asked him to, Gordon would sit in on the sessions and try to offer whatever extra support he could. That was what happened when Gordon was working every hour of the day and night setting up Petrus and Ronnie had agreed to attend an eight-week detox and rehabilitation programme at the Priory in Roehampton, south-west London.

  The Priory is famous as the place where troubled celebrities check in claiming to be suffering from dubious-sounding complaints like ‘exhaustion’ or ‘stress’. It is, in fact, one of the most serious addiction-treatment centres in the country. The vast majority of its clients are not celebrities or famous names. Ordinary people from all walks of life go there, normally with anxious families like the Ramsays waiting nervously in the wings.

  When you are at the Priory, you, and your family, are treated like everyone else, forced to live by the same rules and regimes, to contribute to the same sessions and aim for the same results. So, however many business commitments he had, Gordon was expected to turn up for whichever sessions Ronnie needed him for. And, tough as they were, he didn’t miss a single one. ‘It used to reduce me to tears. I’d sit in the car for an hour afterwards, trying to come to terms with it. I couldn’t bear seeing Ronnie that way. When you go to places like that, you realise you’ve got no problems in life. It makes me realise how lucky I am. The guys in there go to hell and back,’ he said after sitting through one long series of emotional therapy sessions, desperately hoping that the message had got through to his brother.

  And for a long while it seemed as if it had. When the £1,000-a-week rehabilitation courses were over Ronnie swore he was ready to stay clean and start afresh – and Gordon was convinced that they had finally turned the corner. Ronnie got a job in one of his brother’s kitchens and, with some rare responsibility and structure in his days, he began to thrive. Gordon handed over some extra money each week so that Ronnie could take judo lessons, and everyone seemed happy and calm. So Gordon’s voice cannot hide the anger when he admits that it all went wrong. Nor can he hide the fear that history will carry on repeating itself, and that his brother may be lost for ever.

  ‘After all that security and support and going clean, he still goes out and relapses. He had the perfect opportunity to get better but when I found out he was using again I realised we had probably given him too much, too soon. I brought him into our house. He lived with Tana and me, we got him a job but it still turned into a total nightmare. He’s done rehab three times. If I was asked to fund it again, I’d do it, but I know damn well it won’t work. I’ve been let down so many times. He’s stolen from me, he’s been in Tana’s bag. I’ve given him money for haircuts and the next minute he’s on his mobile in the middle of King’s Cross buying heroin.

  ‘That’s the scary thing. It’s everywhere. To get him to stop, you’d have to put him on an island. It’s grim, it’s shitty, it’s paranoid. I’m amazed by what his body has learned to tolerate. But if he’s not careful he will kill himself. I don’t know how long his immune system can hold out. It’s a disgusting drug.’

  And, as Ronnie continued to plumb new depths, so did Gordon. One particular occasion was most chilling of all. ‘The deal was that he could have one more score, a £10 bag, before he went into rehab one more time. I had to sit and watch him use and it’s tortured me ever since. He tied the arm, waited for the vein. Have you ever seen heroin? It’s like mud, like rusty water that’s been left in an old bath. I’ve been through some low points in my life but that was the shittiest thing I’ve ever witnessed. That was my brother, the man I grew up with, shared a room with. Now he is doing that. Hard to believe it’s the same person.’

  As if that wasn’t enough, there were the times when a desperate Ronnie tried to persuade his brother to try drugs as well, believing it would help Gordon understand the pressures he was under and the battles he had to fight. Gordon, in tears, refused each and every time.

  So could Ronnie ever recover, and could the brothers ever be reconciled? Suddenly, in the middle of 2000, hopes were higher than they had been at any time since, a year earlier, the fateful day at Silverstone had been arranged and then cancelled. After being spared a prison sentence for theft and placed on probation for two years, Ronnie spoke for the first time about the demons in his head.

  ‘I am not proud of my addiction, I’m fed up with it – and that’s coming from the heart,’ he said. ‘It began eight or nine years ago when my parents separated. It started off as an occasional thing when I was 24. Then my father died in January last year. I was his favourite son and that affected me. I fell back into drugs badly. My brother has been behind me all the way. He rings me every day without fail for 45 minutes at a time. My whole family are a huge support. So many times my brother has dropped everything, leaving his family and business behind to come all over the world to collect me when I am in trouble.’

  Ronnie’s solicitor, Nigel Yeo, also acknowledged the support Gordon and the rest of the Ramsay family continued to offer his client. ‘Ronnie still receives a lot of support from his family and speaks to his brother daily. He has also been provided with a car by his brother to enable him to find work and to get to work. So he is anxious not to betray his family’s trust. He has been free of drugs for one week, which is a start. He feels that if he is free of drugs for the next week he can get a job.’

  Leaving court, Ronnie himself swore he could finally turn his life around. ‘I feel quite positive now,’ he said. ‘I’ve got probation, which is what I had hoped for because I can get more help with counselling. I stopped my methadone prescription a week ago and I’m trying my hardest to keep clean this time.’

  Some 160 miles from Bridgwater, Gordon kept his fingers crossed but knew he had to keep his distance. In their homes, his mother and sisters were doing the same. This t
ime Ronnie might make it, they all hoped. This time he might be able to cross the line and come back to them all.

  Gordon in particular was desperate to win back the best friend he had known as a child but rarely seen since. The rest of the year would be a vital test and, however hard Gordon worked in his kitchens, at his business or in his home life, Ronnie would always be at the back of his mind. ‘Every time I look at a four-ring gas burner I imagine my little brother on the back ring, simmering away. You would have to be a very callous, hard bastard in life to conclude that you can write off any member of your own family.’

  So maybe, Gordon thought, this would be the time that Ronnie would kick his habit and stay clean. Maybe Ronnie could once more be the brother and best friend he had been more than a decade earlier. Maybe this time Megan, Holly and Jack could have an uncle in their lives again. Maybe.

  NINE

  MICHELIN STARS

  Like most men, at 18 Gordon had dreamed of owning a Porsche. But when he finally saved up enough money to buy his first car the reality was a little different. ‘It was an old Fiat Strada that was fucking ghastly beyond belief. It was like going around in a baked-bean tin with a hairdryer for an engine, constantly farting.’ His next car wasn’t much better: a terminally uncool Austin Princess that he called ‘the ugliest car in history’.

  So the car Gordon collected in January 2001 is the perfect illustration of how far he had travelled in life. It was a blue Ferrari 550 Maranello worth a cool £152,000 and capable of up to 200mph. His wife Tana bought it, as a surprise, and handed him the keys on a very special occasion: the day he found out he had won a historic third Michelin star. Looking at his new car and holding the letter from Michelin left Gordon unsure about which excited him the most. ‘I think from Monday to Friday the third star is the best news but from Saturday morning to Sunday it has got to be the Ferrari,’ he finally concluded.

  Nevertheless, the importance of the third star was hard to overlook. Awarded to Gordon Ramsay in Chelsea, it meant the restaurant was officially the very best in London. After a row with the Michelin organisation the previous year, Marco Pierre White and Nico Ladenis had both handed back their three stars. So in 2001 Gordon was safely at the top of his game and the very top of his profession. He was also busier than ever, with television producers knocking on his door almost as often as hungry diners. Having shocked Middle England with his language and his passion in the Boiling Point documentary, Gordon was preparing to do pretty much the same again in a controversial episode of the BBC’s Friends for Dinner – before wooing all his critics back with an extraordinarily emotional episode of Channel 4’s award-winning makeover show Faking It.

  Picking Gordon to go on Friends for Dinner was seen as controversial because the show tended to attract the description ‘cosy’ in most television reviews. And that wasn’t a word many people associated with Gordon Ramsay. The idea behind the show was simple. Ordinary people planning dinner parties would be filmed getting some extra tips from chefs or restaurant owners and could call them for advice right up until the event itself. It was all as far from the angry, hurly-burly world of a true professional kitchen as could be imagined. Or at least it was until Gordon agreed to take part.

  He was matched up with 40-year-old management consultant Simon Law and tension built up from the very start. ‘Gordon who?’ was Simon’s reaction on being told who his mentor was going to be. And his interest in cooking didn’t seem to improve much when he had been told. After inviting Simon round to Gordon Ramsay to watch the professionals at work, Gordon soon became convinced that the amateur chef wasn’t really ready to learn – one of the greatest sins in the Ramsay book. ‘I thought it would be a nice gesture to have him in my kitchen but it was two days of hell. He has not been told he is wrong in 30 years, he wasn’t interested in learning and he was rude.’ And this was while the two men were still getting along.

  Things heated up one day when Simon rang his mentor for advice – at precisely the wrong time. ‘It was 1.30pm and of course I was busy. The guy had the cheek to tell me not to panic and I said I wasn’t panicking but I did have 49 people in the restaurant wanting lunch and they were more important to me than a management consultant who wants to be a star for the day. I threw the phone against the wall and then into the bin.’

  It all made fantastic television, of course. As did the scene at the end of Simon’s two-day spell in the Ramsay kitchen when the chef blew icing sugar over his protege in a moment of frustration – only to have the whole packet thrown over his head.

  Having threatened to walk off the show altogether, Gordon pulled back from the brink, pretended he hadn’t heard when his meringues were called ‘naff’ and even turned up as a guest at the obligatory dinner party Simon threw at the end of the show. ‘Tense’, rather than ‘cosy’, is probably the best word to describe that evening. ‘He may be a vicious git in the kitchen but away from all that Gordon is actually a very nice guy,’ was how Simon summed up the experience after the cameras has departed. Gordon, however, was even less prepared to mince his words than normal when asked about his would-be protege. ‘The guy found it hard to understand discipline. He is a three-star Michelin plonker,’ was his final verdict on his unlucky onscreen companion.

  That certainly wasn’t the kind of language Gordon would use to describe his next hopeful protege – a shy Geordie burger-van worker named Ed Devlin. As part of Channel 4’s Faking It series, Gordon had been picked as one of the team who would try to convert Ed into a convincing head chef for an international haute cuisine contest in London. It was to be an inspiring, emotional, almost heartbreaking experience for all concerned.

  The scruffy, unshaven, quietly spoken Ed certainly had a bad start on the show. The first meal he cooked for Mezzo chef David Laris and his wife was a disaster and then, with the cameras rolling, his duck in cranberry sauce came second to an eight-year-old girl’s pan-fried salmon in a cooking competition for Brownies.

  Fortunately, Ed was a fast learner and the quality of his food was soon judged to be up to standard. His problem was that he was useless at running a kitchen. He admitted he hated shouting at people, swearing or telling others what to do. And without that skill, Ed’s mentors said, he could never fool the judges and fake it as a top chef. Which was where Gordon came in.

  A week in Gordon’s kitchen was seen as an essential way for Ed to learn what a real chef looks, acts and sounds like. Ed was horrified from the moment he walked through the door. ‘I thought I would never last the first day, let alone a week,’ he said after less than two hours in the chef’s company. ‘I hate being rude or people being rude to me. I missed my home and when Gordon was shouting at me I felt like jacking it in because I just thought I didn’t need all that.’ And for a while it looked as if the pair would never get over their differences. ‘I’m really glad I don’t live in his head. It must be a really cold and sterile place. Having to be Gordon Ramsay for the rest of your life, that’s like a curse,’ was how Ed first viewed the man who seemed to have been yelling, ‘I don’t want to see a wimp – I can’t stand wimps’ at him from the moment they had met.

  As so often happens with Gordon, it was a football match that ultimately brought the pair together. Gordon decided Ed should referee it, in order to learn more about authority, taking control and making decisions. It was a turning point for them both. ‘I think it would have been very easy to leave with him thinking I was a dick and me thinking he was a twat,’ Ed said later. ‘And we could have carried on for the rest of our lives thinking that. But fortunately we reassessed our first evaluations.’ A most unlikely friendship was born.

  In the remaining days of the four-week shoot, Gordon worked harder and harder to toughen up his charge and get him ready for the competition. And when the time came Ed was up for the challenge. He led his team of chefs with Ramsayesque passion, created the three-course meal for 12 and won over all three of the expert judges in the haute cuisine competition. In the process he created what even America
n audiences voted one of the best-ever Faking It moments when the series was shown across the Atlantic the following year. Back in Britain, the reaction had been the same and the show had won Best Factual TV Moment in the 2001 BBC television awards.

  What Ed was able to do after spending so much time with Gordon was give a rare insight into his character. He reckoned there was more to the man than the swearing and the stereotype – though he wasn’t entirely sure what that was. ‘Gordon is actually a very likeable guy and I won’t have a bad word said against him. He is inspiring to be around and once he steps inside the kitchen he changes and comes alive. His enthusiasm is infectious and he has this fantastic ability to raise people above the merely exceptional to verging on the sublime. Outside of the kitchen, Gordon is quiet and shy. While I didn’t get to know him very well, what I did know I liked. Mind you, I think you could spend 20 years with Gordon and still not know him any better.’

  And, while the two men had struck up such an amazing rapport, it looked as if they would remain worlds apart when the show was over. Gordon invited Ed and his partner Martine to his London restaurant for a celebratory meal. But the couple stayed in the North-East. Ed, who left his old burger business and found a new job working full-time in the kitchens of Gateshead Council, was spending most of his time clearing tables and washing dishes. He harbours no ambitions for a career in show business or in a fancier kitchen. ‘Gordon proves that to be a top chef you have to want it one hundred per cent, one hundred per cent of the time, and I don’t. The show hasn’t changed me at all. I think I am more appreciative of good food now and I know the effort and the science that goes into making an expensive meal. But I’m happy with my life and, while it is great that people still want to stop and talk about the show, I never wanted to be famous.’

  Gordon, however, was fast becoming more famous by the year. And he was finding out that fame and fortune can both come at a price. What happened to his £152,000 Ferrari was a case in point. Within weeks of getting the car’s keys, Gordon and his old friend Marcus Wareing had left Gordon Ramsay at the end of dinner service and headed down the Fulham Road for a 2am breakfast. While he was reversing into a parking space in front of the Vingt-Quatre restaurant, a woman in the queue outside stepped into Gordon’s path. ‘She slapped the back of my car for no apparent reason,’ Gordon later told Marylebone Magistrates’ Court, where the matter was finally resolved in his favour. ‘I moved forward because she was shouting and banging her hands on the boot. I did not understand what was going on. I wanted to get out of the car but it was difficult because she would not let me out. I had to wind down the window and she was shouting: “Did you not see me? I was in the road.” While the window was open, she was screaming at me in a high-pitched voice. She was saying that I was arrogant and boisterous. She said, “I don’t like your arrogance, you arrogant chef.” And she said, “What would you do if I scratched your car?”’