From gourmand to gourmet
Peter Bazalgette
THE NIGEL LAWSON DIET BOOK
Michael Joseph, £12.99, pp. 120
What's going on here? A former Chancellor, a noted trencherman and father of a noted trencherman, loses five stone and writes a diet book. I feared that perhaps he had fallen out of love with food. Some four years ago I wanted to persuade Nigel Lawson to appear in a television documentary. Having been told the way to his heart was via his stomach, I laid on quite a spread in a private room. He toyed with the food, poured fizzy water into the premier cm Chablis and avoided the second-growth claret altogether (perfectly courteously, I should add). But no, he tells us, the man inside still likes his tuck. It was just that at 17 stone an arthritic knee was . . . and how ludicrous would you like my fake Italian accent to be? preventing him enjoying his tennis.
Now he has revealed how he downsized himself by almost a third. Will the book sell? Best-selling diet books are typified by a January or July publication (for the post- Christmas or pre-holiday slim), they are inexpensive paperbacks and are written by slender, role-model women who appear on the cover in a leotard. At £13 in hardback this book seems to fail on all counts.
The one other attribute successful diet books need is to be completely daft. They must be based on some spurious theory which the born-again dieter can sign up to. Separating carbohydrates and protein, `detoxifying' the body with vegetables, spot- reducing fat from thighs and hips — all this is discredited nonsense. What really happens on any of these diets is that people simply cut down their calorie intake. This Nigel Lawson sensibly acknowledges, eschewing all new age theories, pills and potions. And the gradual weight loss he recommends is medically sound.
Perhaps this modest volume is really one man's rite of passage from gourmand to gourmet. Along the way he compares the standards of cuisine in a number of British embassies and recommends the Caribbean for weight loss, because the food does not get close to meriting even one Lawson star. All diet regimes allow you treats like the occasional Kit Kat. When we learn that our Nigel's treat is caviar with blinis and sour cream washed down with vodka we begin to get the measure of the man. So he hasn't fallen out of love with food after all. And he certainly remains a politician.
In his novel approach to slimming he equates weight loss with monetary growth targets and planning a dietary campaign with the Medium-Term Financial Strategy. One feels this may not have instant appeal to the fatty on the Clapham omnibus. He even finds room to advocate an indepen- dent Bank of England. So this is not so much a diet book, more a charming politi- cal memoir with the unusual bonus of a few recipes. These are provided by Therese Lawson and are worth a glance. I particu- larly recommend her lemon sauce on page 110.
Despite its eccentricities I do admire the way in which Nigel Lawson's innate good sense informs the book. He argues that he is not trying to persuade anyone to lose weight, merely to enable those who have decided to, to do so. Nor does he advocate thinness as any sort of virtue. It is indeed comforting to reflect that happy, mildly plump people tend to live longer than thin, moralising types. This is something the life insurance companies are proving slow to recognise but this book is perfectly at home with.
A final word about the Lawson dog. Lady Lawson reveals that the beast has put on weight eating the scraps her master now discards. Could we have the Lawson Doggy Diet Book next? Now there's a surefire bestseller.
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