Marco Pierre White: I will never speak to Gordon Ramsay again

Audio: interview with Marco Pierre White

Marco Pierre White wants me to go stalking - again. The thing is that I’ve been stalking with Marco several times before, just as I’ve shot pheasants, duck, woodcock, partridge and snipe with him - often all in the same day. I’ve also accompanied him fishing for salmon, trout, pike and perch.

Today, though, all I want is to sit down with Marco in the shade for a couple of hours and ask him about White Slave, his eagerlyawaited, warts-and-all autobiography, which is about to be serialised in both Telegraph papers.

I want to know the truth about his spats with the likes of Gordon Ramsay, Albert Roux, Michael Caine and Raymond Blanc. I want to know if he really did make love to a customer between courses at Harveys, his restaurant in south London, in the late 1980s.

I want to know about his dealings with the late Oliver Reed and, yes, I want to know what the heck is going on with his marriage, after Mati, his third wife, very publicly accused him of sleeping with two of his waitresses.

But, sure enough, here we are speeding down the M3 in a leather-upholstered Range Rover on the way to an estate in deepest Hampshire. There’s a rifle sitting on the back seat beside me, along with a couple of cases of white wine, shooting jackets, bullets, binoculars, Wellington boots and other country clobber.

Mr Ishi, his Japanese man-servant with a penchant for Shirley Bassey CDs, is at the wheel (Marco has never taken his driving test and has no intention of starting now); mobile phones are ringing as if the end of the world is nigh; supplies of Marlborough full-strength cigarettes are running dangerously low; the radio is tuned to Magic FM and the airconditioning is working overtime on one of the hottest days of the year.

“Hello, matey,” says Marco, picking up his mobile in one hand, a plastic bottle of diet Coke in the other. His voice is posher these days, betraying little of his working-class upbringing in Leeds. (He is not French. “Pierre” is his middle name, given to him by an Italian aunt.) “Tell me . . . No, that’s f****** ridiculous. I’m not interested. Let’s talk later. I’ve got the Telegraph here. We’re looking for a buck and then we might stop by the Test for some fishing. God bless, matey. Call me.”

“How much is your mobile phone bill a month, Marco?” I ask. “About £1,000,” he says. “And how many cigarettes do you smoke?” “I don’t count.” I do. He’s already on his third and we haven’t even reached the M25 turn-off. I reckon he must be on four packs a day. Which can’t be good for his health, but without the ciggies and the mobiles and the diet Cokes, I don’t know how Marco, who will be 45 this year, would survive. He’d be miserable. There’s nothing in the world that he loves more than holding court with his ciggies, mobiles and diet Cokes in a Range Rover en route to the killing fields of England.

I remember him telling me once that his favourite film of all time is The Godfather. Of course it is. The phone rings again. I hear David Cameron’s name mentioned, which eventually gets us on to politics. “I can’t stand Blair,” says Marco. “The man is a complete creep. Am I right?” “Have you ever met Cameron?” I ask. “No,” says Marco, “but I’m having dinner with him tonight.” And a broad smile stretches across his face. “Have you ever had therapy?” I ask.

Of course, he hasn’t. But, with considerable help from a ghost-writer, he has written his life story and it’s the closest he’s got to sitting on the confessional couch. The process hasn’t been easy, but he says it has been hugely rewarding. A dash or two of introspection and a few great big dollops of raw honesty appear to have done wonders for the psyche of our once most irascible celebrity chef, who first drew attention to himself by throwing out customers if they asked for salt and pepper.

He went on, of course, to become the youngest man ever to win three coveted Michelin stars, spawning a family of almost equally talented cooks in the process, including Gordon Ramsay and Heston Blumenthal.

“Doing the book has made me a stronger person within,” says Marco. “And if in some way my book can help anyone else battle their way to the top -of whatever field - and get over certain things that have happened in their childhood then it will have been worthwhile.

“It will also give my children an insight into my life and help them understand why I am what I am. Despite the things that happened to me, I was given a talent and I believe you have a moral obligation to share it with others. I don’t believe I have compromised any friendships in the book. Actually, I have resisted banging on about the famous people I have met.”

Really? A lot of celebrities do seem to pop up in White Slave. They include Madonna and Guy Ritchie (“very special people in my life”), Prince Charles and Princess Diana, Sylvester Stallone, Mick Jagger, Heather Mills, John Major - for whom he cooked a celebratory lunch during which the ovens exploded - Sir Rocco Forte, Damien Hirst, Antony Worrall Thompson, who introduced him to Mati, and Frankie Dettori, his current business partner with whom he has restaurants called Frankie’s.

“Oliver Reed was a great man who did things his own way. He used to come into Harveys, my restaurant in Wandsworth, and sit on the floor to have a drink before going to the table. On one occasion, he started praising everything - the décor, the service, the food. I said: ‘Ollie, you’ve been here dozens of times and I know you like the place. You don’t have to say all these nice things.’ And he said: ‘Yes, but this is the only time I’ve been here sober.’ ”

Maybe it’s true that friendships have not been compromised in White Slave (although the story about sex with a customer between courses, by the way, really did happen), but enemies have been confirmed. Take Ramsay, the man whom Marco employed at Harveys and who went on to become his most famous protégé.

“I will never speak to him again. I gave him his first break in the business and I believe strongly in being loyal to people who have helped you. Is that strange? I don’t believe it is. Several things happened that I found completely unacceptable and I talk about them in the book.”

It particularly bothered Marco that Ramsay used one of his former’s boss’s analogies about footballers and chefs, and then turned it against him. “I had given an interview in which I said that just as not all good footballers make good managers, not all good chefs make good restaurateurs, then I read an interview he gave and saw that he was saying exactly the same thing but implying that I was a good chef but not a good restaurateur.”

Then there was the issue of Ramsay turning up at Marco’s wedding to Mati with a camera crew in tow — without permission from either the bride or groom. “In fact, the first we knew about it was when we switched on the television to watch one of his programmes and saw footage of our big day on the screen. Now, that is disgusting behaviour, isn’t it? You tell me. Is that the correct way to treat a so-called friend? I don’t think so.”

Marco does, however, accept some responsibility for creating what he calls the “monster Ramsay” by exposing the future star of Hell’s Kitchen to daily rituals of humiliation, foul language, flying knives and almost unbearable pressure, as was the norm behind the scenes at Harveys. But Ramsay could take it. In fact, it wasn’t until his last day before going off to work for Albert Roux at Le Gavroche that the then youngster cracked.

“I can’t remember what it was about, but I yelled at him and he lost it. The next thing I knew he was sobbing in the corner, holding his head in his hands, with tears rolling down his cheeks. He was saying things like, ‘I don’t care what you do to me. Hit me. I don’t care.’”

Marco insists that his harsh regime at Harveys was not manufactured. “I was just concerned with what was going on people’s plates. They were also brash, Thatcherite times and I was a part of the jigsaw. If you hadn’t been to Harveys you hadn’t been anywhere.” Even so, it’s Ramsay who has gone on to be a bigger star, but Marco doesn’t regard him as a chef at all, not any more.

“You can’t be a chef and appear on television all the time. It’s impossible. At least when I earned my stars I was always behind my stove.” Albert Roux is another big cheese who might not want a signed copy of Marco’s book. He was best man at Marco’s second wedding, to the model Lisa Butcher.

“He looked me in the face and put the knife in my back,” says Marco, as we drive round the edge of a corn field in search of deer. “I have never spoken to him since - and nor will I. Jealousy is the only reason I can give for it. I spell it out in the book and people can make up their own minds. “As far as I am concerned ambition is the most dangerous occupation in the world. I have never been ambitious, or if I have, it’s only been by default.”

This is classic Marco. Because it is evident, from the day he left school in Leeds without any qualifications and took a job as a kitchen assistant at the Hotel St George in Harrogate on £16 a week, that ambition has been his one constant motivator. As anyone who knows him will tell you, a pinch of salt just won’t do when listening to him dissecting his career.

You need buckets of it. Except for one part, the defining moment of his life, about which he writes movingly and with brutal candour: the death of his mother (who was Italian) from a brain haemorrhage. She was 38 and he was six. “I remember it better than I remember yesterday,” he says.

“It has affected everything I have ever done. It’s the reason I used to go off on my own and play in the woods as a child and it’s the reason I still like to go off in the woods as an adult. I know I have craved recognition as a result of losing my mother and I know I have done some really stupid things because I did not have that stability as a child. It has been very painful looking at it in such detail but it had to be done.”

Family is important to Marco. “Good friends and family is true wealth,” says the man who had a distant relationship with his English father and three brothers and who spent much of his childhood on his own. But thinking that family is important and establishing a happy family are different things. Marco is on his third attempt at marriage. In 1988, he married Alex McCarthy. The photographer, Bob Carlos Clarke, was best man and the ceremony was at Chelsea Town Hall.

Guests at the reception might have been anxious about the long-term prospects of the marriage when they listened to Marco’s speech. It was short and more than a little contrived: “I’ve got to get back to work,” he said. And off he went. They were together two years, during which time their daughter Lettie was born, to whom Marco remains close.

Then came the Lisa Butcher debacle. She was a model whom Marco describes as “one of the most exquisite-looking women in the world”. At the time, he was 30 and she was 21. They met at Tramp, the King’s Road nightclub, and were married three weeks later amid much fanfare at the Brompton Oratory in Knightsbridge. Marco says today that he was so intoxicated by her looks that he forgot to think about her personality.

But it can’t have helped the marriage when, after being asked by a reporter what he thought of his bride’s £3,000 floor-length, backless white dress designed by Bruce Oldfield, he said she looked as if she was dressed to go down the catwalk rather than the aisle.

Four months later, they were divorced. Not long afterwards, Marco fell in love with Mati Conejero, who worked for him at The Canteen. The daughter of Spanish parents, she was born in Majorca but grew up in England. They have three children, Luciano, 12, Marco, 11, and Mirabelle, 4.

Marco Snr says in the book that she is the only other woman apart from his mother that he has ever truly loved. But he doesn’t deny that the relationship has been nearly as volatile as life back in that kitchen at Harveys — and almost as violent.

In 2003, following a row at the couple’s Holland Park home over Marco’s friendship - “and it was only a friendship,” he insists - with the American banker Robin Saunders, Mati attacked him by throwing a lamp in his face and kicking him in his private parts.

Marco has always denied that he hit her back but says he was forced to restrain her. Mati called the police and Marco was carted off to the Notting Hill police station, where he was held for 14 hours before Mati withdrew her accusation, but not before she had sent out a text message to all those in Marco’s mobile phone address book. I was one. The message read: “Marco Pierre White has left his wife and three children for Robin Saunders.”

More recently, Mati stormed into Luciano’s, Marco’s restaurant in London’s St James’s Street, and confronted one of the waitresses. “Pack your bags and go. Now!” As astonished customers choked on their tagliatelle, Mati screamed: “You are the second waitress my husband is f******.” When a member of staff suggested that Mati was making a fool of herself, she replied: “Marco has been making a fool of me for years.”

I have known Marco for the best part of 10 years and am inclined to believe that his mistress is not tall or blonde or short or dark, but can be described in one word: adrenaline. He adores it. And he may well be insecure, selfpossessed and tetchy when it suits him, but he is also intensely loyal.

“So, what is the situation with Mati?” I ask Marco as we stop for lunch at his Yew Tree restaurant near Newbury, confident that the rifle is in the back of the Range Rover with Mr Ishi standing guard. “The main point for me is that I have not been unfaithful to my wife and I am still in love with her. We are still together.”

Actually, at the moment they are not together. Mati is in Portugal with the children and will then spend much of the rest of the summer in Spain. It is, however, definitely not a trial separation and friends of the couple are hoping that a five- to six-week break from each other will help them both.

“I am not the sort of person who gives up,” he continues. “I know what it’s like to grow up without parents who aren’t around and my children are the most important people in the world to me. In a situation like this, when things aren’t ideal, I ask myself what my mother would expect of me. She would want me to fight to keep my family together. My mother lived with a difficult man and I think there were times when she wanted to go back to Italy but she didn’t. She didn’t walk away - and nor will I.”

• To order ‘White Slave’ by Marco Pierre White (Orion) for £18 (rrp £20) plus £1.25 p & p, call Telegraph Books on 0870 428 4112. A limited number of copies signed by the author are available on a first-come, first-served basis.