Clarissa Dickson Wright: 'I go to Mass to say thank you'

Clarissa Dickson Wright, the outspoken cook and TV presenter, opens up about her faith, surviving alcoholism and the endangered joys of country living

Clarissa Dickson Wright
Clarissa Dickson Wright Credit: Photo: MARTIN POPE

Clarissa Dickson Wright is back, and ready for a fight. “David Cameron assumes the countryside is on his side,” says this formidable cook, countrywoman and campaigner, “but it could go wrong for him if he’s not careful.”

What does she mean? “I haven’t yet heard people say they’re going to erupt and block the motorways with tractors over the hunting ban, but we have seen what has happened over milk prices,” she says, warning of unrest that may lead to protests. “It’s a tough life for farmers, and it hasn’t got any better under this Government. David Cameron ought to do something for the countryside. To the best of my knowledge, he hasn’t given us anything so far.”

Clarissa Dickson Wright came to fame as one of television’s Two Fat Ladies, riding a motorcycle and sidecar across the country in search of good, old-fashioned food. But she is also known as a passionate campaigner for country pursuits, even once being arrested for hare coursing.

“I’m not necessarily talking about lifting the hunting ban. It could be to do with the importation of food, European regulations, anything. People accept that the Conservatives are hindered by the Liberal Democrats, so they are waiting. But how long will they wait? I don’t know.”

There are good reasons for the Prime Minister to take this warning seriously, and not just because she has a licence for a shotgun. Clarissa is a tough, bluntly funny 65-year-old who would happily kill a rabbit and skin it before cooking up a gorgeous stew. She is also, crucially, enormously popular in the hills and vales.

“I am a Tory,” she says, and there is no doubt that she speaks for a body of opinion within the party. Wearing a true-blue cotton smock, she sounds like she ought to command a castle, with an army of staff. As it happens, Clarissa Theresa Philomena Aileen Mary Josephine Agnes Elsie Trilby Louise Esmerelda Dickson Wright blew a family fortune that ran to millions. She lives in a modest home in rural Scotland and has a “char” who comes in twice a week.

We are meeting in the Goring Hotel in central London, a favourite haunt of the Royal Family and her home-from-home when she comes down from Inveresk. A television company is paying her bill because she is set to return to our screens. “I always said that if we had a change of government I would be back on television, because we wouldn’t have Alastair Campbell blocking it,” she laughs.

Two Fat Ladies attracted 70 million viewers worldwide, before the death of her co-presenter Jennifer Paterson. Then she made the remarkably un-PC series Clarissa and the Countryman, which ran until 2003. The BBC dropped her, she says, for going too far in praise of hunting, which made Blairite blood boil. “Those were glorious years. There we were, fighting the war against them on the same BBC that the leader considered his own personal mouthpiece.”

She is very rude about Mr Blair, whom she knew when they were both young barristers in Scotland. “He has psychopath eyes. You know those dead eyes that look at you and try to work out what you want to hear?”

What does she make of him now? “I don’t recognise the young man that I knew. He was this rather wet, long-haired law student and barrister who nobody expected to succeed. One thought he would disappear without trace, or become a clerk at a London court.”

They are both attempting a comeback. Dickson Wright has just finished filming a new three-part series for BBC Four on breakfast, lunch and dinner, plus an episode of the Great British Food Revival, celebrating rabbits, both to be shown later in the autumn. “Did you know that Yorkshire pudding used to be served without meat, but with rabbit gravy? I could eat that now. Send for the chef!”

Disappointingly, she has already eaten and wants nothing more than sparkling mineral water.

A further part of her attack on the public consciousness is a new book, Clarissa’s England, which describes itself as “a gamely gallop through the English counties”. If you want to know why Boudicca was the original Essex girl, Lincolnshire has a coriander crop second only to India, and a Cornish pastie should never contain carrots, this is the place to look. “It is a personal journey through my England, the parts I have known and loved throughout my life,” she says. And what a life.

She was born into wealth and privilege as the daughter of a surgeon to the Royal Family, but her father was a drunk who beat her up. Clarissa became the youngest woman ever called to the Bar. But she hit the bottle herself on the day her mother died, and the despair she felt led to alcoholism.

She spent all her £2.8 million inheritance in 12 years of heavy drinking. She has been declared bankrupt twice. “My own stupid fault. I’ve always been bad with finance. It’s from not having to worry about it. If you grow up with money, you never really learn that it doesn’t grow on trees.”

In the new book, she says her great affection for Kent comes from having got sober there, in 1987. “I was a morally, physically and spiritually destitute drunk when I attended Robert Lefever’s Promis Recovery Centre at Nonington, not far from Canterbury.”

She says her recovery was driven by a rediscovery of her own personal spirituality, “I’m not a very good or compliant Catholic. I reserve my right to disagree. On the other side, I come from a long line of Nonconformists. My ancestors fought with Cromwell. Other ancestors went with Guy Fawkes. So we’re bolshy on both sides.”

That’s a surprise then, I say. She laughs. “Genes will out!”

The clinic was an answer to prayer. “When the end came – I was down on my knees cleaning burnt jam off quarry tiles in a kitchen – I did say, ‘Dear God, if you’re up there, please do something, because I simply can’t go on.’ Over the next six months, a sequence of events slid me into the clinic and into recovery. I was terrified. Life had become such an effort. I had no money. I had to work to feed my habit.” What was she drinking? “Two bottles of gin a day. And then some.”

She always says it wasn’t the food that made her fat, but the damage she did to her metabolism by drinking pints of tonic water to go with the gin. The doctor thought she had malaria, but it turned out to be quinine poisoning from the tonic. She was killing herself slowly, but the drink had also stopped working.

“I couldn’t get oblivion. I would have gone to the Embankment and jumped into the river, except that somewhere at the back of my head was the possibility that there was a Christian heaven, where I might have to face my mother. I couldn’t bear the thought of her saying, ‘Oh darling, what were you doing?’  ”

Through a friend, she was admitted to the Promis clinic, where she showed the deviousness of a drunk. “Apparently, I told them my Australian trustees would pay. I had been there four weeks without a drink when they discovered that my trustees did not exist.” They let her stay anyway. “I got sober, and I have stayed sober for 25 years.”

Does she still attend Alcoholics Anonymous? “Oh yes, I like going to AA meetings – they are better than television. I talk to my support group on the phone quite often. My life since then has been amazing.”

A TV producer spotted her selling books at a shop in Edinburgh, teamed this eloquent, forthright food lover with Jennifer Paterson and created the Two Fat Ladies. They made four series, after which Countryman ran for three years.

Her support for the Countryside Alliance led in 2007 to a private prosecution by the International Fund For Animal Welfare. She pleaded guilty to attending two hare-coursing events in North Yorkshire, although she had thought they were legal because the greyhounds were muzzled. The magistrate gave her an absolute discharge. “I did not get a criminal record for that,” she says. “I was quite looking forward to going to jail in Yorkshire and writing the prison cookbook. It would have been a rest.”

She has published an autobiography and a number of popular cookbooks, and travels the country almost continuously as a public speaker. So how is she doing these days, financially? “Fine, thanks. I turned down an awful lot of money from a supermarket chain years back. I don’t regret it. I used to say that all I had left in life was my integrity and my cleavage. Now it’s just my integrity.”

The Government asked her to support its rural policies, she says. “I had tea with the Environment Secretary last year. They hoped I would do some promotional stuff. But the reason the countryside think I’m great is that I don’t tell lies. Why would I do it? I don’t do things on politicians’ terms.”

As for her love life, she has always been coy – apart from confessing that she once made love with an MP behind the Speaker’s chair in the House of Commons, an entertaining tale from her drunken years that was told well after the event. But she’s in a good mood so I dare to ask, does she have a partner now?

“Well, I have an admirer who has been around an awfully long time. I’m not going to marry him. He would get a nasty shock if I said I was. It does very well. We are very companionable.”

Do they live together? “Heaven forfend! I don’t mind cooking his meals, but wash his socks? No. I live in Scotland, he lives down south, so it all works very well.”

Things are looking up again for one of life’s great survivors. She has recently recovered from pleurisy, which made her all the more grateful. “My God is not that of the Church, but I go to Mass because I like to have somewhere formal to say thank you. I think that’s appropriate, don’t you?”

She takes another slug of water. “When I think of the beating I have given my poor body over the years, I’m bloody lucky to be still here.”

* ‘Clarissa’s England’ by Clarissa Dickson Wright (Hodder and Stoughton, £20) is available from Telegraph Books at £18 + £1.35 p&p. Call 0844 871 1516 or visit books.telegraph.co.uk