As the mother of premature twins now home after spending the first weeks of their lives in incubators, Tana Ramsay has every reason to be protective. However, the 25-year-old wife of celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay is defending her husband, not her babies.
“One of the things that really annoys me is people who say ‘Oh, Gordon wasn’t at the birth, he doesn’t change nappies’. Quite frankly, it’s no one else’s business.”
Critics might argue that her husband is perfectly capable of sticking up for himself. His bullish nature is as famous as his cooking. The former Rangers player turned culinary genius became a laddish hero after a Channel Four team filmed him abusing his kitchen staff in colourful language.
But Tana believes her husband gets a raw deal. She praises his devotion to work and is happy for him to remain the breadwinner while she stays at home with the twins and first daughter Megan.
In a recent interview, Ramsay said he lacks the patience to be a “hands-on” father to very young babies and poured scorn on the suggestion that he might ever change a nappy. He was not present when his wife had a Caesarean delivery on Hogmanay. He does not even cook at home - except for Sunday brunch - and buys his wife Delia Smith books to improve her culinary skills.
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The Ramsays’ traditional approach might be unfashionable. But it has some impressive defenders. Michael Odent, a prominent obstetrician, recently warned fathers to stay away from the birth of their children if they wanted their relationship with their partner to remain healthy. Dads are not prepared for the messiness of birth, said the French guru, and the whole experience can ruin a couple’s sex life.
Neither are the Ramsays the only celebrities to reject the frantic pace of competing careers. Zoe Ball, the ladette DJ, announced she was putting her career on hold to try for a baby after marrying pop star Norman Cook.
By sticking to traditional husband and wife roles, these glamorous couples might also avoid becoming victims of the “crisis of masculinity” said to be sweeping Europe and America. The crisis pervades recent films such as Fight Club and American Beauty. Feminists including Susan Faludi claim men are the new oppressed sex, robbed of their status and usefulness in the workplace and at home.
But if society is crumbling under the weight of gender wars, the Ramsay household seems solid as a service station rock cake.
“Gordon is a great dad,” says Tana.”He works all the hours God sends, Monday to Friday, in the restaurant, so bringing up the children is my responsibility. I don’t expect Gordon to do the midnight feeds or change the nappies.”
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It is just as well she is a traditionalist - Ramsay once said he would not employ a female chef because they get premenstrual tension. But like many old-fashioned men, he takes a rather gallant approach to the women in his family. He does not swear in front of Tana, who warned him, “never speak to me like that”, after watching him berate his sous chefs on television.
Tana insists a traditional man can also be a family man. The couple both come from fairly large families, each being one of four children. Ramsay, who was born in Port Glasgow, spends weekends with Tana and the children - shutting the restaurant and losing thousands as a result. The couple sold their split level, £450,000 penthouse flat when Megan was born to move to a family home with a proper garden.
“He plays with Megan, he might take her away for the day. It’s great. We go to the park or have lunch together. Family is very important to him and to me,” says Tana.
The latest additions to the Ramsay clan were born on Hogmanay at the Portland Hospital in London. Six weeks premature, they weighed 4lb 7oz and 4lb 5oz. They were rushed straight to intensive care for observation after the caesarean delivery.
Ramsay, not knowing the birth was imminent, had gone to work at his restaurant, Petrus, where a party for 100 friends and family was being planned to see in the millennium. When he heard his wife was being taken into the operating theatre he rushed to be with her and arrived just moments before the birth. But he declined to go into the theatre.
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“I only got to hold them before they were taken away so it was very hard,” says Tana. “It was distressing for Gordon too, he had missed the birth and after checking that I was okay he went to see them. They were on heart monitors and there were all these breathing tubes and a drip, which he saw before I did. There wasn’t anything in particular wrong with them, it’s just that doctors need to be sure they can keep their body heat.”
For the next two weeks the twins remained in incubators until they reached the body weight of a newborn baby. Tana visited daily to feed and bath them. Her tiny son and daughter were almost half the size of Megan when she was born, and this was hard to get used to. Other babies in the unit were even smaller. Tana would have stayed had it not been for Megan.
“I’d never left her before and then suddenly I was away for eight days in hospital and then, once I was out, I kept disappearing every day,” says Tana. Wrapped up against the winter cold, the twins made their first venture outside hospital on January 17 when their parents took them home.
Slowly, life has been getting back to normal.
“It’s really a case of trying to get Jack and Holly into some kind of routine. Luckily they’ve been eating and sleeping well.” Jack has been nicknamed Tiger because he is a fighter. He’s already podgier than his sister. “It’s easy to tell them apart,” says Tana. “Holly has black hair and Jack’s blond. In fact, he’s a miniature Gordon.”
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It comes as no surprise, given their ideas on family life, that they will not use outside help. Instead, Ramsay’s sister Yvonne will become their nanny, moving in along with her own 10-year-old daughter, Sophie. She will go to a primary school nearby, the same one the Ramsays hope Megan will attend. “That’s great for us. I want to be the mother. I don’t want someone else taking over,” says Tana. “With Yvonne it means I’ve got someone I trust. If it had been someone else I might have worried they were disciplining the children in a way I didn’t like.”
The Ramsays may reflect a growing social trend. A report by the Henley Centre predicts Britain will see a return of the extended family unit by 2020. Although the number of single-parent households will continue to grow, many parents, grandparents and children will, like the Ramsays, choose or be forced to live together under one roof in large homes.
The pair married three years ago, though they have known each other for seven years. They first met when Tana was training to be a teacher. To help fund her course she was working as an assistant manager of a delicatessen owned by Sir Terence Conran. “It was really through knowing other chefs that I got to know Gordon,” she explains.
Tana is a Montessori teacher of children between the ages of two and five, a method which focuses on the importance of learning through experience. She loved the job, she says, but gave up work when seven months pregnant with Megan.
“I didn’t want to miss out on my children growing up,” she says. Her marriage to Gordon is happy, she says, if hectic. The family are soon to move into a rented house, this time in Battersea, London.
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But for all his macho attitudes, Tana says there is no truth in the rumour that her husband wanted her to give birth in Scotland so his son could play football for the national side. “It was just a joke,” she laughs.