The day ‘Fat Lady’ served pork and was sacked

AS SELF-APPOINTED court jester of the Spectator — where I was then literary editor — Jennifer Paterson saw it as her function in life to embarrass other people.

She had been engaged in the late Seventies to cook the lunches that happened sometimes once a week at the paper or, if it was losing even more money than usual, once a fortnight.

Those who made their way up to the dining room to partake of these famous repasts had to run the gauntlet of Jennifer greeting everyone as if they were her personal guests and hugging those she had never met. ‘What are you giving us for lunch?’ the Prince of Wales asked shyly when she had put him down on the ground again.

‘Raw fish, Your Majesty!’ Jennifer boomed. She had devised a special way of making gravadlax with halibut.

The Israeli ambassador sat down at the table and inquired, ‘I am very sorry, but is that pork?’ as she brought to him a plate with crackling and apple sauce clearly visible on the side of the plate.

‘It won’t do you any harm, darlin’ — just say it’s chicken,’ was Jennifer’s advice.

Choosing to serve pork to the Israeli ambassador, who of course left rather than be seen by a roomful of journalists to be consuming forbidden meat, was one of the many times when Jennifer was sacked. But her tactic on such occasions was to turn up the next day and carry on as if nothing had happened.

Her sacking only became final when, one day, she lost her rag with the editor and threw a trayful of crockery out of the topstorey window. By then, however, her fame was spreading and it was not long before she was starring in a TV cookery show called Two Fat Ladies.