Being little in Ego-land

As soon as she walks into the room, it seems ridiculously easy to look up and say ‘Oh, hi Delia” as if she’s just popped over for a coffee and a natter about football and a new recipe. I’m tempted, before we get down to the nitty-gritty of deciding whether her beloved Norwich City appear doomed after a mere four games in the Premiership, to offer up Marco Pierre White’s elegant fricassee of sea scallops with ginger and an inky sauce nero as a culinary equivalent of Arsenal.

Yet Delia just wants to tell me that ‘Nigel Worthington is the new Arsène Wenger”.

I have to imagine that I already know Delia. The idea of calling her Ms Smith or even Mrs Wynn Jones is absurd when applied to a woman whose first name not only instantly identifies her to millions but defines a very English way of life.

The current transformation of Delia Smith, however, is more intriguing. Football has allowed her to escape the small-screen kitchen as an unedited and naturally gregarious director, majority shareholder and saviour of Norwich.

And yet, all three of last season’s promoted teams — Norwich, West Brom and Crystal Palace — are still awaiting their first win after a combined 12 matches.

‘For us to finish 17th,” she concedes in textbook football-speak, ‘would be fantastic. It’s easy to remember that. But something happens in the Premiership.

Another chairman said, ‘Don’t get sucked into it.’ I knew what he meant. I call it Ego-land, where you have directors swanning round and saying, ‘Yeah, yeah, we’re in the Premier now. We’ve made it.’ But you still have to be little. I believe in being little! Maybe that’s why Norwich are so liked. We are little and something else about us comes through which is nice …”

Delia laughs in slight embarrassment at her own ardour for the ‘little” and the ‘nice”. But if these fit her homely TV persona, they bely the ambition and tough business acumen she has used to rescue and stabilise Norwich. Apart from investing £7-million with her husband, Michael Wynn Jones, she has set up a lucrative catering industry at Carrow Road, which Arsenal intend to use as a template once their new stadium is complete.

It includes a club restaurant — the inevitable ‘Delia’s” — boasting a £2,8-million annual turnover. Yet the real test unfolds on the pitch, where the difference in money and class is most striking.

Norwich’s last game proved the sheer width of the chasm. Even visits to Old Trafford and St James’ Park in the previous week could not quite prepare Delia’s callow Canaries for the dazzling brilliance of Arsenal.

‘They were outstanding,” she says of the champions, who dismantled her team in a 4-1 masterclass. ‘After a while I just sat back and appreciated their quality. I’m a huge fan of Wenger. You cannot help but admire his team.

‘There was only one real disappointment. Arsenal came to the hotel and there were kids who had been waiting a long time and their players wouldn’t do anything for them. And Thierry Henry, whom I absolutely adored and worshipped, wouldn’t get off the coach until every child with a camera had been removed. Let’s be generous.

Maybe when you are that calibre and everybody wants a photo or asks you to sign a shirt then perhaps it’s too much. If you want to stay focused on the game then maybe that’s what you need to do at the very highest level of football.”

She concedes that she did not see the incident herself, even if she knows people who did. Her sudden unease at revealing that snippet of gossip merges into a more poignant reflection on her own television image. A desire to underplay the very nature of celebrity — especially her own — is plain.

‘I decided from the outset to teach people how to cook. I was determined the food, rather than me, should be the star. But all the bits I liked — when I laughed or made a mistake — were cut or I was made to do them again. I would’ve preferred it if they’d kept in some of the mistakes and made me a little more human. But I would say the one lovely thing I’ve been blessed with is that I’ve never really understood that I was famous. I feel untouched by it all. It’s my one real gift.”

When asked how she can possibly avoid daily reminders of her fame, Delia thinks long and hard. ‘There was just this one time. I did this series and I still don’t quite know what happened. Every book signing session was crazy. Queues stretched outside the shops with people holding two or three of my books. I tried to sign them all but it was really hard. So maybe, after all, I do understand Thierry Henry.”

Delia lets rip with one of those noisy laughs that the BBC felt were too long and too loud to accompany a boiling egg. It’s an unexpectedly abandoned sound from the ‘prim Brownie-leader” caricature which diminishes her. When asked if she was hurt by the sneering jibes, she answers bluntly. ‘Oh yeah. Definitely. ‘Boring Delia …’”

She laughs again, more sadly than freely, and it’s hard not to think a little differently of Delia Smith. ‘Actually, there was this critic at the Evening Standard, Victor Lewis-Smith, who’s usually a very sardonic writer. But he always gave me a great write-up. He understood. ”

In her new life in football, Smith has poured all her energies and vast commercial savvy into a club she and her husband have supported for 38 years. She spends most of her time at Norwich now — allocating specific days of the week to the catering business, boardroom strategies, corporate sponsorship and training sessions. ‘That is why I’m serious when I make the comparison between Nigel and Wenger. I’m not saying he’s the same kind of man as Wenger, but I believe he’s going to be one of the great achieving managers. There’s an openness about him.

He comes to board meetings and understands our struggles, and it was his idea to invite me on to the team bus and to go regularly to training.

‘When I first came here I told our then manager [Mike Walker] that I wanted to bring in a fitness team. He was horrified. In the end he accepted it, but it was down to me to explain it to the players. There’s something quite intimidating about going into a dressing room of young professional footballers who’re all sitting there, arms folded, watching you. It was also scary going on the team bus, but Nigel helped us all become much more at ease with each other.”

Delia’s relationship with the fans has also improved. ‘My name does get chanted sometimes and it gives me a tingle. ‘Delia, Delia, give us a wave’ is a nice change from what happened in the beginning.

Football fans are very suspicious and I don’t think they necessarily spend a lot of time watching cookery programmes. There was loads of animosity. I remember sitting with the fans in the South Stand. It was a terrible game — against Palace — and this one supporter kept shouting abuse up at me in the directors’ box. I put my arm on his shoulder and said, ‘Are you OK?’ He was shocked. I said, ‘I want to tell you one thing — I’m just as fed up as you.’

‘But the first time someone vented their anger at me I was so shocked and hurt. You learn how to handle it. The best way is to be gracious and just say, ‘I’m sorry …’ And yet for all that, there is nothing in my past work that comes close to matching the wonderful crescendo of last season. Whatever happens in the Premiership, no one can take away that feeling.”

Delia has got the bug, and she’s got it badly. Football has taken over her life. ‘I’m getting to the end of my cookery writing career … I’ve got football now. Football embraces everything. I’m continually amazed. Where else might an eight-year-old and an 80-year-old share something like this? I’m astonished by football’s community spirit. That’s why, for all the money and some of the people drawn to the game now, football will always be all right. It’s a beautiful game. It’ll always be fine.”

Her optimism does not curb her criticism of some of her boardroom counterparts. If Arsenal are regal and haughty, Chelsea and Newcastle are positively vulgar.

‘I’m just sad that money and power are attracting people into football who wouldn’t otherwise be there. They’re not grassroots supporters. I feel sorry for the ordinary fans. I watched those Newcastle supporters on the news last week when Bobby Robson was sacked. They get shoved from pillar to post and my heart goes out to them. Even at Chelsea there must be a fear that it’s not going to last forever. And surely Arsenal fans have a twinge of doubt at the thought of Wenger leaving when there’s a £240-million debt on a new stadium? It’s terribly fragile. What football needs is people who are genuine supporters and acutely business-minded. A football club has to be run like a professional business. We’re doing that here.”

Smith is emphatic that ‘the reason we all love football is that we really don’t know what’s going to happen. Euro 2004 underlined that. Not one journalist said, ‘I’m putting my money on Greece.’ People now say, ‘Oh, Palace and Norwich haven’t got a chance’ — fine. There aren’t any expectations so we can just get on with it. But I’m very realistic. I never allow myself to forget that, while Wenger signed Reyes for £15-million, our whole team cost £4-million.”

When we step into one of the swish executive boxes overlooking the ground on a sparkling September day, Delia freezes a little as the photographer goes to work.

For someone who has made a fortune in front of an unblinking camera, she is curiously shy as she faces the smaller lens. ‘Do you have one to mask a 62-year-old face?” she murmurs.

The photographer encourages her to replicate her animated interview. ‘Could you gesticulate again, Delia?” he asks sweetly.

She looks at me quizzically and I remind her of the night Norwich beat Bayern Munich in the Uefa Cup in 1993. Delia’s away again, reliving an anecdote that ends in another gale of laughter and a memory of how ‘me and Michael got doubly smashed that night. We then went to the game in Milan and we played fantastically well until, with five minutes to go, Dennis Bergkamp scored.”

The Arsenal connection gives way to an anxious sigh. ‘It’s my turn to ask you a question,” she says, sounding every inch the relegation-haunted fan.

‘Do you think we can stay up?”

I don’t want to lie to her, and so I avoid a direct answer. ‘I hope so …”

‘Me too,” she says, looking down at the empty but sunlit ground that now defines her life. ‘Me too …” —