The ongoing feud between Gordon Ramsay and his wife’s family has taken a new twist after it emerged that his mother-in-law intends to take him to an employment tribunal.
According to the Daily Mail, Greta Hutcheson’s son Adam and grandson Christopher Luke also plan to join her in suing the celebrity chef for alleged unfair dismissal, breaches of working time regulations, failure to pay redundancy monies and breach of contract.
The move comes after the complainants were sacked from Ramsay’s restaurant empire last year, following the dismissal of father-in-law, Chris Hutcheson.
Hutcheson, former chief executive of Ramsay Holdings Ltd, had been the financial brains behind the operation for 13 years and helped Ramsay set up the business in the first place. The two men are now locked in a £20 million legal battle over payment for Hutcheson’s 30% stake in the company.
While Ramsay had attempted to build bridges with Mrs Hutcheson, the mother of his wife Tana, the move has obviously failed.
Mrs Hutcheson entered the fray in November last year after sending a letter to Ramsay’s wife on the day of the chef’s 44th birthday, saying: “Tana, you are not welcome anywhere near our door. I cannot believe that you have done this to your father. Until you dispose of that man, you are not welcome back.”
The letter prompted Ramsay, who was in New York at the time filming ‘Kitchen Nightmares’ to write a letter to his mother-in-law, apparently in an attempt to affect a reconciliation with her daughter.
But instead of sending it to her, he gave it to the London Evening Standard to publish against the advice of his PR agency. The letter urged Mrs Hutcheson to see Tana, who he said was “in floods of tears” over the letter. He added: “You’re punishing your daughter and our four children for all the wrong reasons.”
But Ramsay also said that he had hired private detectives to follow her husband and accused him of enjoying “away days”, which were “rarely what I thought they were”, which is unlikely to have smoothed troubled waters.
