Clarissa Dickson Wright has filled her autobiography with indiscretions - but it is those she chooses not to tell that really intrigue, says Cassandra Jardine
I wish I could relate Clarissa Dickson Wright's gossip about "Miranda", as she claims Tony Blair was known at the Bar when they moved in similar circles, back in the 1970s. The dirt she would like to dish on him is eye-popping. Ditto Derry Irvine, Peter Mandelson, Jack Straw and Cherie Blair. "In fact, I could tell you stories about all that Cabinet," she says.
"Go on then," I challenge the remaining half of the Two Fat Ladies cooking duo, "tell me something I don't know about Gordon Brown."
She rises to the occasion with a snippet that, if true, would end the Prime Minister's career. "I heard it from an Edinburgh taxi driver," she says, putting down her embroidery to savour this moment of wickedness, so at odds with the polite surroundings of London's Goring Hotel.
Sadly, these stories are far too outrageous to print either here or in her autobiography, Spilling the Beans - so lurid, indeed, that they probably say more about her wish to shock than anything else.
Being outspoken is as central to her persona as cream and lard are to her cooking. "I do like to bait people," she admits, kicking off this interview as she means to go on. "No lemon for me," she announces to the man dispensing mineral water. "I used to run a bar in St James's where the barman was responsible for supplying his own lemons. He used to pee on them to refresh them."
He looks horrified; she looks gleeful. The room feels cramped, more from the size of her personality than her physical bulk. I can picture her heaving with the same mischievous delight while writing in her new book that Diana, Princess of Wales had "the perfect skin of a bulimic", that she once had sex behind the Speaker's Chair with an unnamed MP, and - stirring things up for BBC bosses - that the filming of Two Fat Ladies was often fudged for the camera.
"We had to do everything three times. Sometimes the shot was cut off at breast height. We didn't actually cook anything, but mimicked the actions while describing our techniques."
The woman known as "Krakatoa" to film crews would far rather offend than be dull or "bourgeois". Twelve years ago, when she roared into public consciousness in the sidecar of Jennifer Patterson's motorbike, that quality made her an instant hit.
It wasn't so much the recipes that attracted an international audience of 70 million as the anecdotes that she and Jennifer swapped. Clarissa has many rich seams to mine: 400 years of eccentric ancestors, her parents' salon in St John's Wood, being the youngest woman ever called to the Bar, the extravaganza of her 12-year inheritance-squandering binge, her second career as a blotto cook and then, in 1987, a stint in rehab, after which she substituted manic hard work for gin.
But behind all the extrovert rakishness lay a more touching story that she didn't tell, of an abused child bent on revenge. That only began to come out last autumn when, in view of her stymied TV career, she told listeners of Radio 4's On the Ropes a few snippets. A book deal followed. "I only agreed to write it so I could throw a jolly good 60th birthday party," she says. But a period of absolute hell lay between January, when she started writing, and June 24, when dozens of friends - but none of her fractured family - tucked into wild boar prosciutto.
"It was a toxic experience. I felt ill, sluggish, how you feel when you've eaten something that doesn't agree with you," she says. On emotional territory, her fluency dries up. Whenever possible, she seeks an exit into humour. "At AA meetings I would say, 'I'm so much better now I'm drinking', and they would gasp in horror, but I meant I was at the point of writing about it in my book."
She was six when she first saw her father, surgeon to the royals Arthur Dickson Wright, hit her sweet, unbookish mother, Molly. Aged 12, she challenged her father to protect her mother and became his victim, too. He would burst into her bedroom and throw her against the wall in drunken rages.
Mental cruelty was his other forte: he ran his four children down, cheated them of the happy endings to books and made Christmas a misery. One morning, he calmly ate his breakfast as "Mollypop" opened the letter informing her that he wanted a divorce.
Early on, Clarissa resolved to become a lawyer, so she could call her father to account. But, when she was 27, her mother died, leaving her money and a feeling that life "had no purpose"; within a year, her father, who had left home in 1968 when she was doing her Bar finals, also passed away.
To fill the void she started drinking. Seven years later, when the love of her life - Clive ("no surname, because he has children") - died of drink, she redoubled the self-destruction, adding risky sex to her addictions until, aged 40, she reached a stark choice between death and drying out.
"I wrote the book in just two months," she says, "it just poured out of me." Without a diary to refer to, her recall is extraordinary. No doubt having an IQ of 196 helped.
"Having a high IQ doesn't mean you have any common sense," she points out. Nor self-restraint. It took several pints of tonic a day, accompanying her gins, to damage her adrenal gland so badly that she has been fat ever since. In the book, she often refers wistfully to her youthful good looks but she won't do self-pity.
"If I hadn't run, swum well and played tennis when I was young, I might regret it. There's no point weeping. That wouldn't help you get on with life."
In rehab, there was a turning point when she sobbed over her father: "You poor, stupid man, didn't you realise that all we wanted to do was love you and have you love us?"
She and her detested father are in many ways very alike - intellectually gifted and angry. "I get my memory from him, and my gift for after-dinner speaking. Like him, I am never without a book. But the most difficult thing to come to terms with is that I get my love of food from him. It's my whole life and it was the great love of my father's life."
That tainted love provided her salvation - a post-rehab job selling cookery books. From there she was asked to pilot Two Fat Ladies and, despite Roy Hattersley's view that "these two hideous women will never succeed", they did, spectacularly.
"I liked fame because it gave me a voice," she says. She used it, as rector of the University of Aberdeen, to defeat the introduction of tuition fees in Scotland. Clarissa and the Countryman gave her an opportunity to extol bloodsports but the hate mail was colossal. "At one point I could scarcely get through my door. It stopped when I said I was going to exhibit the letters to raise money."
Unfortunately, the BBC was less resourceful. "I was the country's favourite cook," she says sadly, "but every year proposals are put together for new series, and when they reach the politicos at the top they get thrown out." Hence her recent third bout of bankruptcy.
It is now a struggle to pay the rent on her home near Edinburgh through earnings from writing, public speaking, and food and countryside consultancies, but she claims to be happy enough.
"Yes," she replies brusquely to a question about whether there is a man in her life; "not particularly," she says to the perhaps soppy notion that writing proved a form of exorcism. "But it didn't do me any harm - and I did have a good party."
More thoughtfully, she adds: "Sometimes I think that if I hadn't spent all my money, I wouldn't have to be book-signing now. But when I look back on the person I was and the person I am now, I'm much nicer. Sometimes you have to go through the fire."
• 'Spilling the Beans' by Clarissa Dickson Wright is published by Hodder and Stoughton and is available for £16.99 + £1.25 p&p. To order, call Telegraph Books on 0870 428 4112 or visit www.books.telegraph.co.uk
