Celebrity chef Jamie Oliver has revealed he was targeted by “Cornish terrorists” after opening a restaurant in southwest England. The TV personality said he was sent threats by the Cornish National Liberation Army (CNLA), a paramilitary group calling for Cornwall’s independence, after opening a branch of his Italian-British restaurant chain Fifteen in the county. Recounting the experience on James O’Brien’s Full Disclosure podcast, Jamie said he’d received “death threats” from the “terror group” after setting up shop in 2006.
“I had a bomb squad there when I opened because I was English,” he said. “We had death threats from Cornish terrorists, Cornish separatists.” The restauranteur, whose Fifteen chain once stretched across the UK before its financial collapse in 2019, joked that he later learned of family links to Cornwall, where his ancestors lived 400 years ago.
“And that guy [who] did the death threat, who licked the stamp, who got done for another crime, was only second-generation Cornish and came from up north,” he added.
The CNLA was a short-lived nationalist organisation mainly active in the mid-2000s and was known to have incited backlash to new business arrivals from England including Jamie Oliver and fellow restauranteur Rick Stein.
Rick Stein’s Seafood Restaurant in Padstow was also announced as a target by the group, with the extremists threatening to burn the celebrity chef’s flagship branch down in 2007.
While the CNLA claimed credit for a fire at the site in 2017, the Cornwall Fire and Rescue Service said the blaze was “probably [due to] an electrical issue and not one of deliberate ignition”.
They also branded Jamie an “incomer” whose arrival in Newquay they suggested was negatively impacting locals by driving up living costs and house prices.
The CNLA claimed to stem from the An Gof organisation, a militant Cornish nationalist movement suspected of a series of attacks in the 1980s, including bombings and fires.