Do we like Jamie Oliver?
Our score: 7 out of 10. No harmful words or company turned up, and he has campaigned for healthier food; a withdrawn book and a collapsed restaurant empire keep it from the top.
The big story this year is a comeback. Jamie's Italian, which had around 40 UK sites at its peak, was set to return with a flagship in London's Leicester Square, run with Brava Hospitality Group, the owner of Prezzo. It's a three-floor, 140-seat place built around an open kitchen where you can watch the pasta being made.
The comeback only makes sense against what came before. The chain collapsed into administration in 2019 with about 1,000 jobs lost, and Oliver's email to staff at the time blamed the struggles of the casual dining sector. Former staff later won tribunal awards of more than £471,000 against the failed businesses, which the government's Redundancy Payments Service paid out, and the Mirror reported he put in £1m of his own money to help pay staff.
The other stumble was a children's book, Billy and the Epic Escape, in late 2024. The National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Education Corporation criticised it for stereotyping First Nations people, and its publisher admitted nobody from any Indigenous organisation, community or individual was consulted. Oliver pulled it and said he was “devastated to have caused offence”, which is the right move, if a bit late.
On the harm check, we found nothing against him: no slurs, no conspiracy rabbit holes, no dodgy company on his recent projects that we could source. The one clear political stand we read was in 2016, when he posted that his faith in Britain would be “broken forever” if Boris Johnson became prime minister. We found nothing either way on his views on LGBTQ+ rights, so that's a gap rather than a tick.
The good stuff is mostly food policy. In 2018 he asked Scotland's First Minister to back a ban on two-for-one pizza deals, pitching it as a fair choice that British families lack. Some columnists called it nanny-state stuff from a multi-millionaire who owns pizza restaurants, which is fair comment, but the cause itself is about kids' health.
So the verdict: he's a decent bloke who has campaigned for years on what people eat, and who has copped some well-earned knocks. The collapse and the book are real marks, but the book was pulled with an apology and he reportedly put his own money into the collapse. We'd happily watch his next show.