Nigella Winning The Saatchi War

Many have lost sight of the fact that those on trial at Isleworth Crown Court are not Charles Saatchi or his now ex-wife Nigella Lawson, but the Grillo sisters, who stand accused of serious fraud, the amounts running well into six figures. And yesterday’s events did nothing to help, as the Domestic Goddess (tm) arrived to have her turn in the witness box. The event did not disappoint.

But Nigella, I only popped in for a cuppa

Ms Lawson had one purpose to fulfil: to show the watching world that, whatever the Grillo sisters may have done, the real baddy was Saatchi. The public would already tend to her side; the revelations about her former partner’s behaviour, and the toll it had taken on her, would do the rest. And so it proved, as she dumped even the occasional taking of drugs on him.

Ms Lawson admitted that she had taken cocaine with her late husband John Diamond, when he was in the latter stages of his struggle with cancer. Then she admitted to taking it once, more recently, because “I felt subjected to intimate terrorism by Mr Saatchi”. And she had smoked cannabis during the latter stages of her second marriage: “I found it made an intolerable situation tolerable”.

Then she administered the coup de grace: “I have to say, since freeing myself from a brilliant but brutal man, I'm now totally cannabis, cocaine, any drug-free”. Yes, it was all his fault, and left to her own devices, Nigella is once more the Domestic Goddess (tm) that we all know and love. The knife was then twisted by further revelations which suggested Saatchi was inviting fraud.

“Charles kept a huge stash of cash above the fridge ... He put it in a lunch plastic zippy freezer bag above the fridge. I think he did like a huge wad of cash because he didn’t like to use credit cards himself”. And the “Annabel’s” referred to earlier turned out not to be a nightspot, but a London wine cellar: “Mr Saatchi likes to drink wine and he likes to drink expensive wine”. Quite so.

All that was left was to detail the state of her marriage to Saatchi: she “admitted her ten-year marriage to the businessman may have been doomed from the start” and told that “Yes, he did have a temper and I don’t think that anyone can be in any doubt he had a temper”. Saatchi shouted and swore, behaviour which the Daily Mail hacks writing up the copy will find all too familiar.

And then she told that Saatchi “said to me that if I didn’t go back to him and clear his name he would destroy me – and also started spreading false allegations of drug use, and in particular that awful incident at Scott’s”. I said back at the time of the incident at Scott’s that Saatchi was on a lost cause trying to explain away his behaviour and dump on Nigella. That is now plain for all to see.

Give your nasty campaign up, Charlie boy. You’ll only look a bigger shit.