“The only woman for the job!” Nigella Lawson should be the new Bake Off judge Great British Bread

WWhen Prue Leith announced she was leaving The Great British Bake Off, on the grounds that “for heaven’s sake I’m 86”, there was only one character who could realistically replace her. And so it happened. Believe the press rumors and the next Bake Off judge is Nigella Lawson.

If true, this is the best possible recall of a series that has – if we’re being honest – lost its way. Bake Off has gotten a little long in the tooth over the last half decade or so. This is partly because the talent has changed (over the years we’ve lost Mel, Sue, Mary Berry, Sandi Toksvig, Matt Lucas and now Prue Leith) and partly because the series struggles to keep its challenges fresh.

If it repeats the old, safe formula that made it popular in the first place, it risks becoming outdated. If she continues to escalate the difficulty, she risks alienating the home baker with astonishing levels of avant-garde conceptual science. If she tries to do patriotic weeks again, as she did when she dressed everyone in Mexican hats and rocked maracas during her ill-advised Mexican Week in 2022, her viewers will die of vicarious embarrassment.

What The Great British Bake Off needs now is a mix of hard-to-find talent. A new judge needs real experience based on decades of experience. They also need criminal intelligence and enough charisma to fill the cracks in the form.

There are some characters who can achieve some of this. TV chef Lauren Pascal may be gorgeous, but according to her Instagram, she’s now primarily in the skincare business. Chef and author Ravneet Gill has a level of pastry experience that rivals Paul Hollywood, but he doesn’t have the right level of name recognition. There’s also the possibility that, since the show has been running long enough, Bake Off may have chosen one of its alumni as a judge, perhaps by appointing the show’s first winner, Edd Kimber, or its sixth, Nadiya Hussain. But the problem with this is that they are not Lawson’s Nigella sativa.

Nigella has been at the forefront of home cooking for almost 30 years, since the publication of How to Eat in 1998. It’s been the face of it since just a year later, when Nigella Bites first appeared on Channel 4. And with each subsequent release, it only strengthened its position. Now in her mid-60s, she’s exactly what the show needs right now. It’s strikingly British, and manages to balance the kind of familiarity that will reassure existing viewers with a level of international first-name recognition that might ultimately lead to a growing audience.

The only time I saw Nigella Lawson in action on the body was during a press day for Channel 4’s short-lived cooking competition series The Taste more than a decade ago. While co-judges Ludo Lefebvre and Anthony Bourdain were tough and talkative respectively, Nigella managed to be both at the same time. At first she was so arrogant that the mere thought of making eye contact with her terrified the life out of me, but then she clicked the spell so devastatingly that I was reduced to a puddle. I have photographic evidence, which bears sweat stains, to prove it.

This is exactly the combination that Bake Off requires. While Paul Hollywood is usually stereotyped as a harsh judge, the truth is that Mary Berry and Prue Leith had a steely, domineering core that was equally unwavering. They were beautiful, of course, but pause any old episode and you’ll see the flint looks in their eyes. They both asked you to convince them. Nigella sativa is the same. She is tremendously intelligent and has high expectations. Imagine being served a crumbled soufflé. Imagine the pain and disappointment in her eyes.

In fact, The Great British Bake Off is much closer to its end than its beginning. Like his fellow Knights of War MasterChef and The Apprentice, he’s been beginning to wear down his shoulders in recent years, and will soon be headed to the knacker’s yard. But if he’s going to come out, he deserves to come out as strong as possible. Nigella Lawson is the only woman to hold this position.