It is with deep sadness that we have to bring you news – curiously omitted from the national newspapers – that Gordon Ramsay is not going to be with us for very much longer. His words, as reported in Time Out Dubai, are unambiguous:

“By the time I’m 45, my plan is to score three stars in Paris, three in New York and three in London – and then I’m going to move to Dubai fulltime.”

Why then, have our great national newspapers kept this news from the British Public? Is it pique at being ‘scooped’ by a listings magazine in a desert?

Is it through concern that our greatest chef was simply disorientated? TO reports that our hero had “just stepped off a 14-hour flight from New York, following a 10-day working tour that spanned Tokyo, London, Toronto, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York and now Dubai [which he had already] sped round… in a helicopter”. (It was presumably during all these flights that he had time to craft the recent edict against food miles.)

Or is it, perhaps, that Fleet Street’s finest have finally begun to react against the chef’s self-promoting pronouncements which – on closer inspection – often seem to disappear, mirage-like, into the sand...