Nancy Dell’Olio: ‘Britain hasn’t seen the worst of Brexit yet’

For a while in the early noughties, there were few women so associated with football in this country as Nancy Dell’Olio. She wasn’t a player, of course, rather what some came to call “the Godmother of the WAGs”, thanks to her long and storied relationship with the puzzlingly randy England manager Sven-Göran Eriksson.

Dell’Olio has, in fact, never played the sport in her life, on account of the fact that “to play with your feet is something that is not easy”, but times change, and thankfully these days women command headlines for their exploits on the pitch rather than off it. England’s Lionesses have, after all, reached the semi-finals of Euro 2022.

“Hmm, I’m not really crazy about women playing football,” Dell’Olio says, taking a sip of her Bloody Mary. She has said she intends to “look 30 at 70”, and you’d be a fool to bet against it (but even more of a fool to tell her otherwise). Today, at the chronological age of 60, she is in full glam clobber for lunch at Brown’s in Mayfair: silk teal dress, raven hair artfully feathered, enough jewellery to break an airport scanner, signature makeup perfectly vampish. And on top form.

“Actually,” she reconsiders, “I think tactically, and strategically, they are even better [than the men]. I’ve been watching some, because I like to see the strategy, how they organise. Because it’s not just the strength you have in your legs, it’s the strength you have here…” She points to her ornate plume of hair, but I think means her head. “To anticipate. That’s what’s always fascinated me about sport.”

Dell’Olio has been a public figure for more than 20 years, and a popular one at that, but you could be forgiven for stuttering over quite what it is she does for a living. In brief, her disputed biography reads as if it’s been written by a telenovela scribe on a pressing deadline: born in New York to American and Italian parents, she moved to southern Italy when she was five, and later studied law in Rome and New York. As a student, she was reportedly mown down by a car and left in a coma for an indeterminate amount of time.

In the 1990s, she fell in love with, and later married, Giancarlo Mazza, a millionaire lawyer 24 years her senior, and stood for election for Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia party (“I was young, it was a great moment to make a little change,” she has said). She then married the late Mazza, before leaving him in 1998 for Eriksson, his friend, who was then managing Lazio. They were together for nine years, but the Swede would later say that the relationship went “on for too long”.

“She demanded constant attention, and I got more and more irritated with her,” Eriksson wrote in his 2013 autobiography, Sven: My Story, in which he also called her “unbearable”. When it was published, Dell’Olio claimed she was taking legal action.

Eriksson became England manager in 2000, and brought his girlfriend with him. Their relationship gave the tabloids acres of copy, in part thanks to Dell’Olio’s glamour and near-cartoonish levels of Italian attitude, but largely due to Eriksson’s inability to keep his little striker in the dugout.

In My Story, he wrote boastfully about – deep breath – flings with “a beautiful Italian actress called Debora Caprioglio”; “a really nice Swedish woman called Malin who worked at the Grand Hotel in Stockholm”; Roxy, “a singer and former gymnast from Romania”; “a Swedish woman who worked for Scandinavian Airlines”; “a dark, curvy beauty called Graziella Mancinelli”; and of course the TV presenter Ulrika Jonsson. We mostly heard about the last one.

Not all of them overlapped with Dell’Olio, but many did, and it meant she had to put on a front, often playing up to the character of Nancy Dell’Olio such was the press attention. “I’ve been famous a long time. Sometimes it’s been fun, sometimes I take it with the right distance. When I came to this country, and I came for my personal life, it was not my choice,” she says.

“I knew my partner had a very public role, so I tried to behave in a way to contain the damage. I was the victim, my life was immediately put in the public eye, [but] I didn’t do anything. So then you play the game.” She points out that through it all, “in the media, nobody got anything from me, never any gossip from me”. Which is true actually; despite being painted as the seductress “diva without a cause”, it was always the bedroom activities of her boring Swedish boyfriend that fuelled the media.

She and Eriksson broke up in 2007, but fought years later – lawyers were involved – over a property he owned in Belgravia that she’d allegedly lived in rent-free for longer than he claimed he’d allowed her. Reported money troubles followed. Now, of course, Sven is ancient history. But Dell’Olio remained a London socialite (“Everyone in London knows me,” she whispers, leaning across the table), her legacy as WAG-in-chief maintained.

Through it all, she says, she “never loved that term [WAG], and never considered myself part of the WAGs.” Well, was she friends with the ones who did? “Friends is a very big word. Did I know them? Of course. Victoria Beckham was the only one. We managed to keep in touch. Shelly [sic] Cole, a little…”

Did she catch the Wagatha Christie trial, which pitted Coleen Rooney, a Sven-era WAG, against a later recruit in Rebekah Vardy? “A little bit. I know that England was completely crazy about it. What is the end of that story?” We still don’t have a winner. “It’s pathetic. It’s not glamorous. The trial is so expensive. They wanted the publicity, probably.”

Dell’Olio’s now well out of it, despite remaining on the scene for years, briefly dating the theatre director Trevor Nunn, and appearing on all manner of reality TV competitions, from Celebrity Big Brother to Celebrity Coach Trip and, of course, Strictly Come Dancing.

“Nothing compares with Strictly. I’ve been told that it has changed, I haven’t seen it,” she says. By now, a Caesar salad has been placed in front of her, and the air conditioning turned down at her behest. It’s fine; the restaurant manager has known her for years. He seems enamoured.

“My niece lives here,” Dell’Olio continues, “she says, ‘After you, auntie, [Strictly] has become so boring’. Because everybody pretends to be professional! I really enjoyed it. I kept saying no for 10 years.” She shrugs. “It was great exercise.”

Dell’Olio no longer lives in  London, having returned a few years ago to Puglia, the “heel” of Italy, where she now works as an official ambassador for the region, promoting it as a holiday destination, hosting events, and appearing with any famous faces that blow in. Recently, she attended a charity gala with the Duchess of York.

But she’s returned to Britain this week to promote her appearance on another forthcoming television challenge, the 17th series of Celebrity Masterchef, in which she cooks alongside one member of the band McFly and the surviving Chuckle brother. Wielding pans in leopard-print leggings and sky-high leather boots, she is, as ever, superb value.

“I love cooking, I love cooking for my friends, I love food,” she insists. It’s another show she said no to “many times”, and found the experience gruelling, not least because the Masterchef kitchen “is so intimidating”, but also because it involved filming in the early morning. “I’ve never been an early-morning person. You can see from the pictures circulating…”

Quite how much she loves cooking seems debatable, when pressed on the matter. What would be her signature dish, if she were to cook me dinner? “I have a few. I’m the sort of person… There are so many beautiful restaurants around the world, but I’m always seeing food in my house. And my mother is great. So I love food. But is cooking my passion? No.”

Right, maybe we should eat out. So who does the cooking at home? “Well, at home I have somebody who cooks for me. But my mother is still cooking at 89, or we have our housekeeper who cooks. But most of the time I’m out.”

Dell’Olio has long referred to her romances as “interruptions” to her more permanent status as a singleton, and has said it’s best to live in an entirely different country from your partner, ideally spending only two days a week together, like the 5:2 diet. I ask if she is single at the moment. The answer is a riddle, even by her standards.

“I’ve finished an interruption. Single? Let’s put it this way: there is somebody in my life, yes, but single is a state of mind. I’m not living with anybody. So single is the way I project myself, in my state of mind. So have I sort of a relationship? Yes. No, we wouldn’t call this a relationship. It’s somebody in my life I see, and quite recent.” An Italian person? “Yes.”

In her capacity as PR ambassador for Puglia, Dell’Olio technically reports to the government, and is frequently in Rome for meetings. She has always taken a keen interest in politics, with friends on both sides of the spectrum in Italy. There, prime minister Mario Draghi resigned on Thursday after his broad coalition fell apart when three parties snubbed a confidence vote. Here in Britain, of course, something not entirely dissimilar has happened. She is just as interested in our troubles as theirs.

“London is not what it used to be, and now you have another crisis! We will see who will be your new prime minister.” Who would be her pick? “Um, the guy. I prefer him, even though I know he’s not very popular. And I think you have an issue in this country with people who have dark skin. It’s my opinion, but I’ve heard it. And I’ve heard that [Liz Truss] is not that brilliant.”

Dell’Olio doesn’t know either of them personally, but “of course” knows Boris Johnson, who she agrees is “very eccentric”, more like an Italian politician. She once showed his father, Stanley, around Puglia, and has previously harangued Boris about Brexit. She was a Remainer, understandably, and is a huge fan of the EU – so much so that the next plot twist in her story may involve standing as an MEP.

“Probably I will get close in politics. We’ll see. I’d like to get involved with the European Parliament in 2024. I’m working on that. I have all the numbers, all the credentials. I’m a lawyer, an international lawyer, I have everything. I believe in Europe. Every decision is made in Europe, and it’s a big mistake for England to be out.”

What is the long-term ambition, I wonder. Prime Minister Dell’Olio? “No.” European President Dell’Olio? She weighs this up. “I would love to work in the European Commission. I will always believe in lobbying for people’s mutual interests. This is the way I started my career. So I will get some time to consider in the autumn.”

She remains a Remainer, but “can see what England gets” from Brexit. “We haven’t seen the worst. You cannot get enough employees, starting with taxi drivers, [then] there are not enough people working in restaurants, and that is bad for London. In the long term, probably, if this country became an offshore country for taxes, you’d probably get back some benefit,” she says.

“Two groups voted for Brexit: the extreme poor, especially people from the North. They had been told people from all over the world are coming to steal their jobs, when the English are unable to do anything! There are not enough. And then there are the extremely very rich financial people. I know a lot of Etonians – they will see that this country should become offshore.”

This, Dell’Olio believes, beginning a puzzling volte-face that I’m now starting to anticipate as her rhetorical trademark, would mean that “long term, probably they were right.”

As a noughties media icon, she is a Tony Blair fan. “Bless him, he put this country at the top, and now in 10 years, the Conservatives in my point of view destroyed things. London was at its highest during the Olympics, and then it started a descent, and became terrible. London is not the same.”

There are, in fact, few world leaders she likes today. Certainly not Putin, and definitely not Joe Biden. “We’re dealing with another pathetic president of the United States, who doesn’t know what he’s talking about. I thought the worst was Trump, but we can’t get it right, one side or the other. So we are living in a strange world.”

In years gone by, Dell’Olio has admitted admiration for Theresa May, Hillary Clinton and Nicola Sturgeon, claiming “the world is ready to be run by women”. I am curious, then: how much does she think the planet’s problems are down to men?

“I would say 70 to 80 per cent. There are some women who aren’t capable. But women are more practical, we would never start a war immediately. Men have more testosterone and masculinity, so we would work to find more solutions,” she says. But wait for it… “Having said that, I don’t like to generalise. In politics it’s the people or the community that should be put ahead of other interests.” She sighs. “Probably I am too idealistic.”

The world now waits to see what the next chapter of Nancy Dell’Olio’s life might hold. That scriptwriter is surely running out of storylines, but there seems to be a limitless supply of new material. She laughs at the idea of predicting the future. It doesn’t seem safe to rule anything out, whether it’s world domination, a pivot to women’s football, or just an appearance on Celebrity Gogglebox. Possibly all three.

Maybe we’ll be talking in her office in Brussels one day, I say. “Could be,” she replies. She then sets off on a long monologue about how the world flipped overnight during Covid, and how now there is a war in Ukraine, but also that when flights were frozen the planet must have benefited, though now a plane ticket from Italy to London costs £600, and the winter will be cold, and Italy will soon have elections, and Britain will have a new prime minister…

The point I think she’s making is that a lot changes, and often. “So I take it day by day, I make a schedule, but we will see. Week after week, something happens. It’s difficult to say what will happen in a few years,” she says.

It really is. Dell’Olio’s salad and Bloody Mary are unfinished, so garrulous she’s been, but a photographer has arrived and she has another interview to enjoy, so I have to cut her off.

“Oh,” she says, with a broad smile. “Are you happy?” I am, so is she. Then comes the parting shot: “Be careful with your article...”

Celebrity Masterchef returns to BBC One and iPlayer next month