Bankers’ greed created this slump. We should be rioting

Alison Roberts
10 Feb 2009

At one point during my meeting with Antony Worrall Thompson, his hands start to shake quite perceptibly, and his eyes, already a little red-rimmed, grow distinctly wet. "I'm so sorry," he says, coughing to cover the tremor in his voice. "I'm just very very angry. I'm shaking because I'm seething."

He is not known for his anger. At 57, Worrall Thompson does not rant or swear like Gordon or Marco or Jamie. On the contrary, "Wozza" is the avuncular, populist "squashed Bee Gee" (as Ramsay cruelly called him) famous for Ready Steady Cook, Saturday Kitchen and an early sterling performance on I'm A Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here!

Despite a harrowing adolescence - he suffered a profound crisis of confidence as a teenager after a horrific rugby accident smashed up his face - he has never dealt with his issues by throwing kitchen implements at sous-chefs. Yet here he is now, hotly furious to the point of tears.

"Last week was probably the toughest week of my adult life," he adds miserably. On Friday, through the gloom and sleet, he and his wife took a wretched tour of their six restaurants to inform the 105 staff members that the group was bust and that 65 of them were losing their jobs. It was pay day and none of those 65 has yet seen a wage packet.

"Funnily enough, actually telling the staff was supposed to be the administrator's job but the administrator was stuck in snow in Swindon." He smiles bitterly at the banality of it. "So my wife and I had to do it. It was probably better that way. At least we could be gentle. Otherwise it's so cold and cut-throat."

Worrall Thompson has used personal savings to buy back two venues in the chain, the Kew and Windsor Grills, but the Lamb Inn and the Greyhound, both in Henley-on-Thames, the Notting Grill and the Barnes Grill will all now close, as will his delicatessen in Windsor. His staff, he says, will be paid through the government scheme that guarantees a statutory redundancy sum of £330 for 12 weeks, though they may have to wait up to a month for their money. If the administrator allows it, he'll bump up some of the missing wages with cash from his own pocket.

"Yes, I've wept over it. I haven't broken down completely, though my wife did a bit the other day. The manager at the Notting Grill has been with me for eight years, he's over 50 and he's going to find it hard to get another job. I've got a young lad there, too, who came to us at 15 and built his way up to be head chef at the age of 23. He's fantastic and he'll get work but it's just so sad. These are people we've nurtured. I hate to think they might now consider me the enemy."

And he is angry, of course, at the villainous banking industry that has refused him help. The recession (he calls it a depression and is convinced we're already into very deep waters indeed) caused custom to slow shockingly from October of last year, at about the time the crunch first hit the high street. As he analyses those months leading to administration, Worrall Thompson illustrates perfectly (and very publicly) the failure of a business sent first to its knees by the slow-down and then trampled in the mud by newly parsimonious bankers. He is back on the rugby field all over again.

"I was 16 when my face was smashed and it took me at least 10 years to get my confidence back. I feel right now as though I'm starting from the bottom again. Mentally, this feels worse."

The problem, replicated in the kitchens of restaurants across London, is a much-reduced cash flow. Even the very biggest names are feeling pinched, or worse. Last year, the company running Tom Aikens's two restaurants went bust, leaving 160 suppliers almost £1 million out of pocket; Jean Christophe Novelli's gastro pub business has been hit by severe financial difficulty; and there are rumours that both Gordon Ramsay and Marco Pierre White are also feeling the pressure.

Yet Worrall Thompson does not owe millions. He is keen to stress that he has always bought restaurants out of profits generated by existing businesses, and that the only loan he has is a maxed-out overdraft. The Grill chain in fact started life in 1997, as a single restaurant in Notting Hill. "I was a fool," he huffs. "I should have borrowed £5 million and then they - my bank - would have shared the pain."

In fact, he owes Lloyds Banking Group "about £225,000" and needed a further £200,000 to cover pay cheques and suppliers into the spring. "At first the London restaurants held up better than those in Henley, say, where the blue-rinse brigade, the old money, just stopped spending," he says.

"But we've definitely noticed a decline in corporate-sector bookings, too. I was in one bank quite recently, and was told: oh yes, we've banned all parties. Or, rather, if they want a party now they have to bring in their own booze through the back door, make sure no one's looking, and have it on the shop floor. I walked into The Ivy without a booking the other day. It's very easy to get an instant booking in most London restaurants now."

Worrall Thompson admits that he could have reacted "more quickly" to the signs of slow-down but in October, he began implementing £120,000 worth of cuts. He reduced staff levels, sought pay cuts and cut the lunchtime service at several venues. He claims that he brought all six restaurants back into profit in December but still it wasn't enough. He and his accountant began to compile a sheaf of financial forecasts with which to apply for the extra cash ("we're professionals and we took a very realistic and very dim view of this coming year") but amazingly Worrall Thompson says that in January Lloyds simply stopped talking to him.

"A letter went completely unanswered and then they stopped taking my calls. I think they were embarrassed about what they were doing to me. Or perhaps frightened of talking to me. I'm a straight-talker, though I always try to keep a civil tongue in my head. Yes, I'd have given them hell but a lack of reply was actually even more stressful."

I hardly dare ask what he thinks of bailed-out bankers taking big bonuses this year. I expect him to explode, finally, and smash every one of the perfectly polished wine glasses awaiting evening service at the still-comfy Windsor Grill. Instead he seems to sag completely, utterly wearied, then almost to whisper: "This is a recession that didn't need to happen. It's a recession created by greed. Why isn't there rioting in the streets?

"I think the Treasury has been very naïve. It seems obvious that they should have applied conditions to the bail out right from the word go. No bonuses. There's been such short-term thinking, such gambling. Yet those responsible still seem the least exposed to pain I had a business with a good brand and I tried to run it as tightly as I could. We were simply cash-strapped for a short period. It's happening everywhere."

Worrall Thompson has always been a very public supporter of the Conservative Party but has little confidence in any political solution. "Someone somewhere has got to have an answer but I don't see it from any of the parties right now. The only thing we can hope is that, six months down the line, people get bored of being in the doldrums and those who've still got jobs start to spend again." Later he says - not entirely facetiously I fear - that "we'll end up like Zimbabwe" if we start printing money to ease the flow.

Of course, he will bounce back, if his staff don't. His astonishing autobiography, published a few years ago, describes a life of huge resilience. The child of two actors, he was horribly neglected by his alcoholic mother who used to lock him in the coal cellar (once, having escaped at the age of three, he claims to have spent several days on the run with a tramp).

Worse, Worrall Thompson revealed sexual abuse at the hands of a teacher at King's College, Canterbury, where he went to school, though he has always counted the rugby accident as an event of greater psychological significance. "I don't think [the abuse] affected me that much," he said. "I'm just stubborn." Altogether, his was an improbably posh and rather odd family: one cousin was the Viscount Montgomery of Alamein and a great-aunt was the mother of the spy Kim Philby.

In any case he never made much money out of the restaurants (he took an £8,000 annual salary from the group, and paid his wife £5,000). Instead, he says, he regarded their future sale as a potential pension. "I love restaurants. They're like a drug. I wasn't much in the kitchens and my managers were always quite autonomous but I did adore it I suppose I shall have to rethink the pension."

Not that he's forced to shop at Lidl these days. Worrall Thompson has his quite separate, and certainly lucrative, TV and publishing careers. He could, in fact, have kept the restaurants open by pledging as security his £1.6 million house in Henley, or by cashing in the property he has bought for his children - but he quickly makes it clear that that was never on the table. "I'm not prepared to put my family in jeopardy. I have another company [for TV and other work] but it's not all my money. I couldn't just take from that."

His domestic life is complicated, but it's Jay, his third wife, whom he credits with getting him out of bed these days (rather a reversal from his early, famously successful sexual career about London). Worrall Thompson has two grown-up boys in Sydney from his second marriage to an Australian whom he met while running his first restaurant, Ménage à Trois in Knightsbridge, a very 1980s establishment, principally famed for serving only starters and puddings.

Jay was once a waitress at Stringfellows (Worrall Thompson and Peter Stringfellow enjoy an old, rather rogue-ish friendship). She came to work for him at the brilliant 190 on Queensgate. They now have two children: Toby-Jack, 13, and Billie-Lara, 11. All the affairs before Jay were the result of insecurity, he says, that lack of confidence caused by his "broken-face". "I shouldn't have married anyone until I met her

"You know, she has a brilliant attitude to all this. I've been very morose at times, I do feel as though I've let lots of people down - my staff, my suppliers - and Jay has tried to kick me out of it. She says it's a new start, and that it doesn't matter about money. Great if it's there; but as long as we love each other and the family is healthy, it doesn't matter. I have to try and take that attitude myself."

So they have cut down on the cleaner; he has swapped his "big juicy Audi" for a greener, cheaper hybrid and, a little ironically, he has stopped spending big bucks at other people's restaurants. "I can always do something else," he says. "I can always be a street market vendor. I can sell my pigs at farmers' markets." He's joking, clearly, but it's the only joke he makes. Worrall Thompson was once our plumpest and jolliest celebrity chef but he looks deflated, actually physically smaller, as I leave Windsor's stormy, and quite deserted, restaurant quarter.

• 

  Daughter of Anne Robinson: Mum offered to buy me Botox for my wedding. I was like: 'I'm sorry?'

  Emma Wilson reveals exactly what it's like to be Anne Robinson's daughter — and about stepping out from under her shadow

  ---

• 

  Flame and glory: Rammstein set to light up London

  Sound check: German industrial metal band Rammstein literally play with fire in their live performances - and now they are about to unleash their singeing spectacle on London. Watch out for your eyebrows

  ---