James Delingpole

Making a difference

Many years ago, when I decided to ‘become’ a novelist, I shipped myself off to a village in south-west France called St Jean de Fos for three months, banned myself from reading any novels in English (lest they corrupt my style) and became an obsessive maker of French dishes like cassoulet because my first book was about a restaurant critic and I wanted to make it perfectly authentic.

• From magazine issue: 20 March 2010

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Alexander Larman

What happened to the Rishi Sunak I knew at school?

I feel much the same way about French cuisine. Does it honestly, truly make the blindest bit of difference whether or not you break the crust of your cassoulet three times, or use goose fat or duck fat, or include lamb or exclude it depending on whether it’s the cassoulet de Toulouse or the cassoulet de Castelnaudary or the cassoulet de l’other place whose name I’ve since forgotten? Or is the rigid formality of French cuisine — all the excessive training you have to go through, the regimentation in the great kitchens, the sublime arrogance of it all — just an elaborate front, designed to create the mystique which hides the unpalatable truth that, actually, Italian cuisine is way better?

This, more or less, is the question likeable New Yorker writer Bill Buford sets out to answer in his two-part series Fat Man in a White Hat (BBC4, Tuesday), but I’m not sure he’s entirely successful. He certainly does the legwork — slaving in a number of mildly terrifying French kitchens; moving with his family to Lyon, the better to learn the chef’s art — but I suspect the inevitable book will be much more interesting than the TV show. Not enough of anything exciting happens; it’s too wordy; there’s no dramatic tension; it’s all served up too straight. Sure, one deplores this hideous new world in which every TV doc now has to involve major humiliation, serious stunt-action sequences, riotous colour and fake-countdown scenarios, in which unless the objective is completed within half a day the entire city will be destroyed. But that’s still no excuse for a return to the good old days of watching-paint-dry TV.

The scene that really exposed the flawed nature of the enterprise, I thought, was when Buford sat in a highly revered French restaurant eating poulet de bresse, stuffed with foie gras and black truffle, with a dash of Viognier and brandy, poached inside a pig’s bladder. Buford spent a very long time telling us how good it was. Yeah. I’m sure. But with ingredients like that, how could it not be?

The Berlusconi Show (BBC2, Wednesday) was an investigation into a question that has puzzled quite a few of us with regards to Italy’s longest-serving premier: how can a man who has been variously accused of perjury, bribery, corruption, tax evasion, mafia links, orgies with prostitutes and extra-marital flings with girls 55 years his junior still remain in charge of a reasonably modern and democratic country like Italy?

‘The Italians like him. It’s as simple as that,’ explained an Italian journalist to the clearly appalled reporter Mark Franchetti (who, though Italian-born himself, has apparently lived here long enough fully to embrace the Nu-British spirit of achingly PC humbug).

I found myself warming to Berlusconi more than I thought I would. You have to say ‘Fair play!’ to a 73-year-old who has managed to arrange his life in such a way that a typical weekend consists of a party in his private residence at which 20 scantily clad hookers sing a song that goes ‘Thank goodness for Silvio!’ And by all accounts they mean it, too. Berlusconi is a real charmer with the ladies, according to one escort girl who spent the night with him as he joked, sang and recited poems to her before giving her a charming tortoise brooch as a going-home present. Not necessarily someone you’d pick as a husband, though.

What I like best, however, is the way he so clearly enrages Italian liberals. One almost exploded with rage as he described the exodus of talent Italy had suffered under Berlusconi. ‘In five years, when we look back at who governed Italy, we will ask how was it possible to believe in people like this,’ he raged. Sorry, mate. No sympathy whatsoever. Try living under 13 years of Blair and Brown, with another Blair-lite to come in May. Only then will you know the true meaning of ‘Men said openly that Christ and His saints slept’.