The Nigella effect

“I used to be not only a glass-half-empty person but ‘the glass is half empty and the liquid isn’t right’.”

I first met Nigella Lawson back in 2018. She wandered barefoot down the tiled hallway of an old Melburnian manor and, just momentarily, a hush settled on the room. It was as if she’d cast the gentlest of spells. Photographers, stylists, caterers, journalists, we were all, for a minute, caught up in her glamour.

“Absolutely,” says Manu Feildel, her co-host on the new season of MKR (formerly My Kitchen Rules). “She walks through the door and the light goes on. She sparkles.”

Glamour. It’s an old Scottish word, originally intended to convey a supernatural, spellbinding beauty – the quality possessed by sirens in Greek myth or the girls from Beauxbatons in Harry Potter books.

When I mention the Beauxbatons girls to Nigella, she laughs, a very mortal, throaty chuckle. And suddenly the spell is broken, everyone relaxes. Because that is another of Nigella’s gifts – making those around her feel seen, welcome, comfortable.

“It’s not her gorgeousness (powerful magnet though that is) that’s the secret of the affection the readers and viewers have for her,” an old friend, historian Simon Schama, once wrote in The Financial. “It’s her deep well of authentic, unstuffy friendliness.”