INTERVIEW No one bays for human blood like a RAGING VEGAN
In his first interview, the Waitrose Food magazine editor forced to quit after making a joke about vegans reveals the horrifying vitriol directed at him, his wife and even his two-week-old baby
ROCKING his newborn son gently to sleep in deepest Somerset last month, the morning had passed peacefully for William Sitwell and his young family. The editor of Waitrose Food magazine was sitting at his in-laws’ kitchen table when his phone began to buzz and ping incessantly. And then ‘all hell broke loose’. Texts, emails, phone calls and ‘alerts’ were arriving in a torrent so thick and fast he had no time to reply. Many were seething with vitriol and hate. Some were unspeakable, making graphic threats of violence not just against Sitwell, but his wife Emily and even their tiny baby, Walter, then just two weeks old.
Frothing with self-righteous rage, his anonymous accusers hoped that he would get the worst forms of cancer, threatened to rape and mutilate his wife and to ‘roast’ their baby to death.
For Sitwell, who is also a television regular on Master Chef, this was his first experience of the ugly face of militant veganism, a horrifying departure from his normal world of upmarket food writing.
And his ‘crime’? Days earlier, he had responded to an email pitch from a freelance journalist in a tone he admits was flippant – a reply in which he jokingly suggested killing vegans, ‘exposing their hypocrisy’ and ‘force-feeding them meat’.
It is obvious that he was trying to be humorous, that his reply was little more than a fleeting expression of world-weary frustration at yet another naïve and badly considered journalistic proposal.
But that message would soon blow up into what he now describes as ‘the most revolting storm of abuse’.
Made public, his email created headlines around the world and huge embarrassment for Waitrose, which was only that week about to launch a new vegan range.
The furore duly cost the 49-yearold his job and put a target on his back for a new wave of violent activists gathered under the banners of militant veganism – a mob whose poisonous behaviour is reminiscent of the animal rights terror groups in the 1980s and 1990s.
Revisiting those events today with The Mail on Sunday – the first time he has spoken publicly about the episode – he confesses to absolute bewilderment.
‘I’ve never known anything like it,’ he recalls. ‘They encouraged me to eat more meat so I might die quicker. But much worse, they also attacked my family. They said of my month-old-son, Walter: “Let’s fatten him up, kill and roast him.”
‘There were threats to rape my wife, tie her up and cut off her genitals. Another said I was an “ugly waste of sperm”.’
‘I blocked people on Instagram, but my thumb started hurting so I gave up. They were baying for my blood – and no one bays for the blood of a human more than a militant, raging vegan.’
He is not their only victim, of course. Earlier this month, a fifthgeneration Devon farmer said he and his farm shop staff had received death threats for offering their customers the chance to pick their own Christmas turkey.
The Association of Meat Suppliers has reportedly met with national counter-terrorism police over the acts of certain animal rights groups, while the National Pig Association says that members ‘cannot sleep’ at night for fear of attacks.
Sitwell’s raised a host of troubling questions, not least why highly respected companies so readily roll over in the face of internet mobs. He maintains he resigned from his role because of the damage he caused, and that he was not, as some have speculated, forced out.
Yet Waitrose said publicly that their well-respected and highly successful editor had ‘gone too far’, and few believe that he could have survived much longer against the ferocious wave of internet thuggery which engulfed him and the supermarket.
Most in Sitwell’s position would be outraged, and quite understand- ably fearful. He, however, insists that he’s simply baffled at the ‘extraordinary levels of anger directed at me’.
If anything, he is more indignant that an email intended as part of a private exchange should have been made public.
‘Yes, the message I sent was puerile,’ he concedes. ‘My 16-yearold daughter even said, “How could you be so stupid?”
‘But it was a remark made in private and I think one is allowed to make remarks in private without assuming they’re going to be made public. Otherwise we’d all speak like automatons.’
Known for both an entertainingly acid tongue and an indomitable belief in free speech, Sitwell has already endured his fair share of criticism.
Making regular appearances as a food critic on BBC2’s Master Chef, he is renowned for his colourful and occasionally devastating put downs of the show’s culinary competitors. He once described a contestant’s plate of food as looking like a ‘car crash in Toy Town’.
He has branded square plates an ‘abomination’ and dismissed the well-meaning founders of the Real Bread Campaign as Marxists.
Sitwell admits he is an easy target. Indeed, the Old Etonian, whose best friend is Tory Brexiteer Jacob Rees-Mogg, is routinely dismissed as a ‘posh ***** r’ on Twitter.
He is the great-nephew of avant garde poet Dame Edith Sitwell, and his family has a 17th Century pile in Northamptonshire.
Asked how many rooms it has, Sitwell claims to have ‘no idea’ – although he does know that renting at least some of them for the night, in a wing available for the masses – costs £500.
His second wife, Emily, a sports PR whom he married last year, is suitably aristocratic. The 31-year-old daughter of racehorse breeder, the 3rd Lord Roborough, she was once tipped as a potential partner for Prince Harry and her cousin – also called Harry – is married to Laura Parker Bowles, daughter of the Duchess of Cornwall.
Not that Sitwell sees himself as being a ‘conceited Etonian’, someone ‘who’s not listening to other people’s voices and opinions’. On the contrary.
‘While I’ve made fun of vegans – and everyone knows that joke: how do you know when someone is a vegan? Because they tell you – I think most pursue their lifestyle choices from a moral standpoint that I cannot argue with.
‘If you think it’s cruel to raise and kill animals for your own protein and pleasure, it’s right that you don’t eat them. That might sound weird coming out of my mouth because of what I’ve done, but no one has done more to raise the profile of vegans in the run-up to International Vegan Day than me.’
That one, reckless email was bashed out rather thoughtlessly on a day like any other last month. It was a reply to a message sent to his Hotmail account from Selene Nelson, a freelance journalist he’d never heard of, who said she was pitching a series of articles on ‘plant-based meals’.
‘The only thing I saw was blah, blah, blah, plant-based series,’ he now recalls.
‘I didn’t know she was a vegan. I
sent back what I thought was a jokey response.’
Sitwell was a bleary-eyed new father at the time, but he’d been in a ‘jolly mood’ that afternoon, he says, and entirely sober. There was no boozy lunch to explain what turned out to be a colossal misjudgment. What vexed him was Ms Nelson’s apparent ignorance of his magazine and what it printed.
‘Anyone who knows the magazine knows I’ve run a disproportionate number of recipes for vegans.
‘Someone coming out and saying, “Why don’t you do a plant-based series” probably did irritate me.
‘We’re competing for the biggest names out there. The idea that a complete unknown writer could land a series like that is a laughable way of pitching.
‘What I wrote was affectionate in some ways – in that at least I bothered to reply. Most editors wouldn’t have done.’
Failing to see the funny side, Ms Nelson promptly pitched a feature to news website Buzzfeed on how vegans were being met with hostility by the mainstream press.
Then the roof fell in. The first Sitwell knew about the impending storm was when his thoughts – he was composing a Christmas message for his Waitrose readers – were interrupted by a curt text message from a Waitrose PR woman. Then came the deluge of hate.
‘I don’t know about Buzzfeed except that they’re an irritant of new media,’ he says. ‘I never looked at their website until they exploded this bomb.’
The story lit up the news agenda for days. A range of heavyweight commentators sprang to Sitwell’s defence while others called for him to be sacked or even arrested.
‘Only the death of a senior royal might have obscured it,’ he says.
‘By Tuesday it was apparent I was causing Waitrose considerable grief. My boss, who was in Toronto, woke up to three big stories: the Yemen, Pakistan and me.
‘It was clear it wasn’t going away and the abuse was becoming extreme. The complaints were flooding in in their thousands, it was trending on Twitter.
‘You look at who some of these people are and they appear like anti-capitalist, May Day agitators. There’s not an orifice without some sort of pin in it.
‘But people were threatening to boycott the store and, most importantly, Waitrose Partners – their staff – had started to complain.’
‘There were those whipping up the fervour and quite enjoying it,’ he adds. ‘The BBC talked about an “editor’s murderous response”. The Guardian columnist George Monbiot wrote “Look what we’re up against”, as if it was some sort of establishment conspiracy.’
Waitrose distanced themselves, and on Wednesday Sitwell apologised in public and stepped down.
He says it is an irony that his downfall came despite the fact he passionately believes we’re all eating too much meat.
Perhaps understandably, Sitwell is reluctant to address the current terror being waged by militant vegans on everyone from farmers to meat companies.
But it is the ordinary consumer, he says, who is left in a ‘permanent state of worry’.
‘Which coffee should I buy? Should I not eat dairy because of the cruelty to cows? Pushing your trolley down a shopping aisle has become a nightmare. It’s for government and retailers to come up with policies that allow shoppers to know they’re making safe judgements.
‘It’s hard enough to feed your family without having to worry about the moral dilemma, too.’
This was not the first time Sitwell had attracted controversy at the upmarket supermarket chain. ‘I’ve had my knuckles wrapped occasionally,’ he admits.
‘There was a moment a few years ago where [food writer and campaigner] Jack Monroe expressed affected outrage that we’d airbrushed out the tattoo on her arm, but in reality we were cleaning up a corner of her shoulder because it looked like a bit of pipe was coming into her arm. But I had to issue a grovelling apology which I thought, personally, was unnecessary.
‘I’ve been told off even for retweeting something, most likely political. I was asked to make it clear on my profile that those views were mine and mine alone.
‘I think businesses in general sometimes pay too much attention to what I might think are minor skirmishes. My view is “gosh, can’t we just let this go, can’t we just ignore it?” Obviously not.
‘Big corporations do have kneejerk reactions to adverse comments and I completely understand that. Waitrose are an extraordinary organisation; a brilliant company of food and drink. They don’t want idiots like me spoiling the party unnecessarily.’
Remarkably, Sitwell recently met his tormentor Selene for lunch – at a vegan pub in Hackney, East London – where he ate ‘very tasty’ vegan tortillas, and does not blame her for the fallout.
‘I wish there were more vegetarians,’ he says, somewhat surprisingly. ‘There are too many people eating too much meat.
‘The Americans, post-war, ate beef as a mark of independence and freedom.
‘Today, in the developing world people are trying to kill and eat as much as possible. There’s a frenzy to catch up with the rest of the world.
‘The fact that all of the biggest restaurant openings lately in Britain have been burger and steak places is extremely disturbing. The consequences of that very inefficient conversion from grain to meat are catastrophic for the environment. That said, vegans do not sit freely on the moral high ground. A vegan world would be catastrophic.
‘First of all, we’d have to kill all the animals. How do we fertilise the land that grows vegetables if we have no animals? The detrimental effect of artificial fertiliser so we can have more carrots is very worrying.
‘Next time you see a vegan eating a strawberry looking guilt-free ask yourself, was that strawberry picked by a bunch of Eastern Europeans shoved into a caravan? Human welfare is just as important. Really, no one has the right to take an extreme position on anything.’
With his Waitrose career now firmly in the past, Sitwell says he hopes to continue working with Master Chef and is planning to expand his supper club business.
But whatever else he decides to do, he remains determined to speak his mind, at the risk of fresh controversy.
‘I could even launch a vegan evening or two,’ he says. ‘With a meat dish on offer for those who might be wavering.’
They said of my baby son: “Let’s fatten him up, kill and roast him.” There were threats to rape my wife, tie her up and cut off her genitals I wish there were more veggies, we eat too much meat