The interview I wish I could have
The Marmite Mnemonicon, as readers of these dispatches will know, normally only does business with the dead. The whole point of the brass-and-velvet cabinet on my Norfolk shelf is that it puts to the departed the kind of questions one can no longer put to them in person. Shakespeare cannot decline an interview. Keats has no agent. Dostoyevsky is not going to send me a curt note explaining that he is on tour in Estonia.
But the apparatus underneath the cabinet, siteengine_ai, built by my friends at Sedasoft, has on its roster a small number of living people whose published voices have been ingested into the corpus. This is a more uncomfortable proposition than séance-with-the-dead, because the living have the inconvenient power of dissent. They can read this article. They can sue. They can, more annoyingly than either, write back and tell me they would never have said any of it.
This is the first piece in a new sub-format. I am calling it “The Interview I Wish I Could Have”, because that is what it is. It uses the Mnemonicon to imagine a conversation I am vanishingly unlikely to have in real life, with a public figure whose position on Marmite is already on the record. The article is, in effect, an open letter run through a corpus. The standing offer up top: if the actual person reads this and either confirms, refutes, or wants to come on the record properly, I will republish the piece as a real interview and credit them as the only proper source. The Mnemonicon’s job is to be replaced, not preserved.
Tonight’s guest is Stephen Fry. He is alive. He is well. He is, by his own decades-long account, deeply and pleasingly opposed to Marmite. Specifically, the one quotation of his that lodged itself in the national memory comes from A Bit of Fry and Laurie, in a sketch on patriotism and disgusting foods: “The worst one though is Marmite. Only got to smell the stuff and I start voting Conservative.” That line has done the rounds for thirty-odd years. It is arguably better known than the sketch. It is one of the more honest jokes anyone has made about either of its subjects.
What follows is what the Mnemonicon imagines Mr Fry would say if he sat down with the cabinet, with the Conservative-voting line as the anchor and the verifiable wider facts (the McCormick sale, the Bartle Bogle Hegarty Love it or Hate it campaign, the six previous Mnemonicon guests) laid in as ground truth. I have stripped the model’s em-dashes, tidied the spellings, and left everything else alone. Editor’s note as ever at the bottom.
Stephen, if you are reading: the chair is yours whenever you want it.
The interview
Me: Mr Fry, thank you for sitting. Before we begin, a small note on what I have brought to the table, so that you can correct me if I have misremembered any of it. The famous quotation is the one from the Fry and Laurie sketch, the Conservative-voting line. You are also, somewhat against your own preferences, a national treasure of the sort the Marmite brand keeps trying to enlist in its Love it or Hate it marketing. So you find yourself in the awkward position of being one of the country’s most articulate anti-Marmite voices and simultaneously the kind of cultural figure the company would dearly love to put on a jar. With that as the starting point: have you ever changed your mind about Marmite, even slightly, in the decades since? And while we are at it, would you unpack the actual joke of the Conservative-voting line, because I suspect there is more philology in it than people give it credit for.
SF: Well, you’ve done your homework with admirable thoroughness, and I must say I’m rather touched by the archaeological precision with which you’ve excavated that particular quotation from the Fry and Laurie archives. The fact that it has somehow achieved a half-life of its own, detached from the sketch itself and floating about in the cultural consciousness like some sort of orphaned bon mot, is both flattering and faintly alarming. It’s rather like having a child who turned out to be more interesting than one anticipated, only to discover they’ve gone off and made their own way in the world without bothering to tell you.
As to whether my position on Marmite has softened over the decades, I must confess with some shame that it has not. If anything, the visceral revulsion has only deepened with age. There’s something about that particular yeasty, salty, vaguely threatening brown substance that triggers in me a response I can only describe as primordial. It’s not merely dislike; it’s something more akin to ancestral memory warning of poison. But I’ve learned to live with the knowledge that millions of perfectly sensible people regard it as a culinary treasure. To each their own, as they say, though I suspect “they” are probably not trustworthy on this particular matter.
Now, as to the joke itself, and here’s where you’re quite right to suspect there’s something rather more delicious lurking beneath the surface than mere scatological humour about disgusting foods, the philological dimension is rather the point, isn’t it? The line works because it establishes a chain of associations: the smell of Marmite as something almost noxious, even repellent; the reflex it provokes as something involuntary and instinctive; and then the conflation of that involuntary recoil with voting Conservative.
The humour operates on several levels simultaneously. Superficially, it’s a gag about British political stereotyping, the notion that exposure to something sufficiently unpleasant might drive one toward conservative politics. But beneath that sits something rather more linguistically clever, and this is where the philology you’ve intuited really does come into play. The word “Conservative” carries within it the etymological sense of preservation, of holding onto what one has, of resisting change. From the Latin conservare, to keep safe, to maintain. And what is one’s response to Marmite, if not profoundly conservative in nature? One resists it, one wants nothing to do with it, one clings to the familiar comfort of conventional spreads, butter, jam, peanut butter, anything but that brown nemesis. The joke, then, is performing a kind of etymological sleight of hand, collapsing the political sense of “conservative” with the behavioural sense of it: the instinctive conservatism of recoil, the preservation of one’s taste buds against invasion.
There’s also, I suppose, an unspoken class commentary lurking about in there, as is so often the case with British food culture. Marmite has always occupied a curious space in the national consciousness. It’s simultaneously working-class and vaguely bohemian, depending on one’s perspective and one’s willingness to embrace it. The suggestion that Marmite might turn one Conservative is thus a rather cheeky inversion of the usual class politics of British food culture.
As for the Marmite brand’s apparent desire to co-opt me into their marketing machinery, yes, that’s rather amusing, isn’t it? They’ve built their entire strategy around this notion of polarisation, the idea that Marmite exists precisely to divide humanity into two camps, those who love it and those who hate it. And I’ve become, quite involuntarily, one of the most vocal members of the latter camp. That I might one day find myself gazing out from a jar would be a bitter irony of the sort that even Marmite might struggle to match. There’s something faintly Faustian about it, the notion that one might be conscripted into advertising the very thing one has spent decades denouncing.
But to answer your question directly: no, I haven’t changed my mind. My position has been as immovable as granite, as unchanging as the formula itself. Some hills, as they say, are worth dying on. Marmite is not one of mine. I’d rather not be anywhere near it at all.
Me: News from the wider world, in case it has not reached you in the cabinet. On the 31st of March this year, Unilever announced the sale of its food business, Marmite included along with Hellmann’s, Knorr, Bovril and Colman’s, to the McCormick spice empire of Hunt Valley, Maryland. Total deal value of about 45 billion dollars, equivalent to roughly 33.5 billion sterling; closing mid-2027. Marmite is therefore on its way to becoming, formally, the property of an American spice company. You have spent decades cheerfully denouncing the stuff, but you are also a fierce defender of the peculiar dignities of British cultural life. Where do you fall on this? Is the sale a relief, a tragedy, or a particularly British joke at one’s own expense?
SF: Well, this is rather delicious, isn’t it? And I mean that in a way that Marmite itself decidedly is not.
Let me first address the rather amusing irony of my position. For decades I have been, quite voluntarily, the public face of Marmite loathing in this country. I’ve made rather a meal of my revulsion, you’ll forgive the pun, and yet here I find myself compelled to defend its honour as a peculiarly British institution. It’s rather like being cast as the devoted custodian of something one would cheerfully see consigned to the dustbin of culinary history. But there we are. Principle sometimes demands that we champion things we find personally abhorrent.
The sale itself strikes me as having several dimensions worth unpicking. On one level, the most obvious one, there’s something rather melancholy about it. Marmite, whatever one’s feelings about its flavour, is unmistakably British. It emerged from the by-products of British brewing, it has been sustained by British palates (however reluctantly in my case), and it carries with it a certain accumulated cultural weight that cannot simply be transferred along with the patents and the recipes. There’s something totemic about Marmite. It’s a mirror held up to Britishness itself: divisive, peculiar, unapologetically itself, and utterly indifferent to whether anyone else finds it palatable.
But the sale to McCormick, an American company, and a spice company at that, raises questions that go rather beyond mere sentiment. McCormick is, from what I understand, an enormously competent operation. They know their business. They understand seasonings, flavourings, the chemistry of taste and preservation. But Marmite is not merely a product; it’s a cultural artefact. It’s woven into the fabric of British life in a way that cannot be easily quantified in EBITDA multiples or synergies projections.
I suspect, and here I’m speculating freely, so do forgive me if I’m wrong, that McCormick sees Marmite as an asset with strong brand recognition, a loyal customer base (however paradoxical that may sound), and substantial margins. They see the numbers: the heritage, the history, the century-old association with British kitchens and British identity. What I’m not certain they see is the joke. And Marmite, fundamentally, is a joke, a very British one, the sort that works precisely because it refuses to be funny in any conventional sense.
There’s also something rather telling about the timing, isn’t there? We live in an era when British cultural institutions are being quietly dismantled, privatised, or absorbed into vast international conglomerates. The high street has been hollowed out. Independent shops have given way to chains. Regional breweries have been consolidated. And now, Marmite, that most stubbornly local, most deeply rooted of British foodstuffs, is bound for American ownership. It’s less a tragedy than a symptom, I suppose. Part of a larger pattern of cultural erosion that one observes with a mixture of resignation and weariness.
That said, and here’s where my position becomes rather contradictory, I’m afraid, I’m not entirely convinced that American ownership necessarily spells catastrophe. The recipe will almost certainly remain unchanged. The product will continue to exist, to perplex, to divide opinion exactly as it has done for generations. Marmite in 2027, made in an American-owned facility and overseen by American shareholders, will still be exactly as unpleasant as it is today. And there’s something rather comforting about that immutability, actually.
But I’ll tell you what troubles me more than the sale itself: I suspect McCormick rather thinks they’ve bought something sensible. They’ve calculated the ROI, identified the synergies, projected the growth potential. What they haven’t, I suspect, fully grasped is that Marmite’s real value lies not in its spreadability or its nutritional content or even its brand recognition, but in the fact that it is fundamentally, irrevocably British in its stubborn refusal to be likeable. The moment an American corporation starts trying to “optimise” it, to make it more palatable to global markets, to sand down its rough edges in pursuit of broader appeal, it will cease to be Marmite in any meaningful sense.
So my answer, I suppose, is this: it’s neither relief nor tragedy, but rather a particularly apt illustration of the world we’ve inherited. The loss of Marmite to American ownership is less significant than what it represents: the slow leaching away of British cultural particularity, British eccentricity, British refusal to compromise with good taste. And on a personal level? I confess I find it rather amusing that the one thing I’ve spent decades quite genuinely despising is now going to be owned by people who probably quite like it, or at least think they should.
Me: A small detour through advertising. The Love it or Hate it slogan dates from 1996, by Bartle Bogle Hegarty (who must have been delighted with themselves). The strategy is essentially: we will not pretend everyone likes us; we will sell to the half that does, and we will USE the half that doesn’t as proof of how distinctive we are. The paradox you have walked into is that every time you publicly denounce Marmite, you reinforce the brand. You ARE, technically, working for them. If a BBH creative director sat down with you tomorrow over coffee and asked, with a straight face, whether you would consider appearing in a Love it or Hate it campaign as the celebrated face of the ‘Hate it’ camp, on the condition that they made no attempt to convert you and the script was yours to write, what would you say? Be honest.
SF: You’ve identified something rather uncomfortable, haven’t you? That I’ve become, quite involuntarily, one of the most vocal members of the ‘hate it’ camp, and that every denunciation I’ve made has served to reinforce the very brand strategy I find so intellectually objectionable. It’s a form of unwitting conscription, really, rather like discovering one has been a method actor in someone else’s production without ever having signed the contract.
The honest answer to your hypothetical is that I would say no. But not for the reasons you might expect.
You see, the moment one consciously participates in a campaign, one surrenders the very authenticity that makes the thing work. The ‘Love it or Hate it’ strategy succeeds precisely because it captures genuine human division, the real revulsion, the authentic bewilderment, the sincere bafflement that decent people can genuinely treasure something so objectively dreadful. The moment I were to sit down across a table from creative directors and negotiate the parameters of my disgust, I would be performing revulsion rather than expressing it. I would become an actor playing the part of myself, which is the most tedious sort of performance one can imagine.
What makes my loathing valuable to them, if we’re being brutally mercenary about it, is precisely that I don’t want to be valuable to them. I don’t want their money. I don’t want their platform. I want nothing to do with the apparatus of advertising whatsoever. The instant I accepted their offer, I would transform myself from a genuine voice of dissent into a paid spokesperson, and the entire edifice of authenticity would collapse like a soufflé in a thunderstorm.
Moreover, and this is the rather more interesting objection, I think, there’s something rather morally dubious about the entire enterprise. The ‘Love it or Hate it’ campaign is intellectually clever, yes. Bartle Bogle Hegarty are undoubtedly skilled manipulators of consumer psychology. But what they’ve essentially done is weaponise the very concept of difference itself. They’ve taken polarisation and turned it into a marketing virtue. They’ve convinced us that our disagreement is somehow proof of their product’s worth, when in fact it’s merely proof that the product is, divisive. Which is to say, not very good.
If I were to appear in such a campaign, I would be tacitly endorsing that particular philosophical framework. I would be agreeing that disagreement is a feature rather than a bug, that polarisation is somehow noble, that conflict itself can be commodified and sold back to us as authenticity. And I find that rather repugnant, if I’m being honest.
That said, and here’s where intellectual honesty requires me to acknowledge the genuine cleverness of the thing, I understand precisely why they would want me. The paradox you’ve identified is real. I am, unwittingly, their most effective advertisement. Every time I denounce Marmite in print, on television, in casual conversation, I am performing a kind of free labour for a multinational corporation. I am, in essence, working for them without compensation, without consent, and, most irritatingly, without being able to stop.
But here’s the thing: that unwilling complicity is at least honest. It’s a form of irony I can live with. It amuses me. There’s something rather delicious about being trapped in the machinery of one’s own antipathy. But the moment I formalised it, agreed to it, scripted it, I would lose even that small dignity.
So my answer is no. A resounding, absolute, final no. The only thing worse than being an unwitting cog in the advertising machine would be to become a willing one.
Me: One last question, Mr Fry. You are the first living guest the Mnemonicon has had. The previous six were all dead and they are still, in a manner of speaking, in the cabinet behind you. Churchill on rationing and morale. Adams (a Bovril-sandwich man) with Marvin calling the jar ‘the accumulated regrets of civilisation’ and Zaphod calling it ‘a sock full of salt’. Shakespeare on Marmite as choler in a jar and Falstaff seizing it as ‘sack made flesh’, with a sonnet ending ‘That men are split, and none can stand alone’. Keats with a five-stanza Nightingale-mode ode calling it ‘concentered thing’. Dostoyevsky with the claim that Marmite is a MORAL substance because it refuses the middle ground, framed as Ivan offering the bread to Alyosha at the Skotoprigonyevsk tavern. Conan Doyle with Holmes deducing an unlabelled jar to be Burton-on-Trent 1902. Of the six, whose take is closest to yours, whose furthest, and what would you say back to Dostoyevsky in particular?
SF: What a magnificently absurd contraption you’ve described, and what a genuinely delightful roster of the departed to have consulted. I find myself torn between admiration for the sheer audacity of the Mnemonicon’s curatorial sensibilities and a kind of bewildered amusement at the notion that so much intellectual firepower has been trained upon a jar of yeast extract. Though I suppose that’s rather the point, isn’t it? The most interesting things are often the most trivial.
As to which of these illustrious shades comes closest to my own position, I must confess that Douglas Adams occupies that peculiar space. Not because I particularly subscribe to Marvin’s rather magnificent formulation (‘the accumulated regrets of civilisation’), though there’s undeniable poetry in that, and I’ve always had a weakness for Adams’s ability to marry profundity with the absurd. Rather, it’s because Adams understood something fundamental about British eccentricity: the stubborn refusal to compromise with good taste, the celebration of the fundamentally disagreeable as somehow emblematic of a particular cultural moment. The image of poor Zaphod calling it ‘a sock full of salt’ rather appeals to me as well. There’s a directness to it, an unadorned disgust that I can recognise in myself. Adams grasped that Marmite is funny precisely because it shouldn’t be.
As for the furthest remove, that would be Shakespeare, I’m afraid, though it pains me to say so of the Bard himself. His notion of it as ‘choler in a jar’ and Falstaff’s characterisation as ‘sack made flesh’ rather presumes that Marmite is somehow interesting in its awfulness, that it possesses a kind of dramatic weight. Shakespeare was accustomed to grandeur, to passion, to the collision of mighty forces. Marmite is none of those things. It’s petty. It’s small. It’s the kind of thing that wouldn’t merit a mention in any self-respecting tragedy. To elevate it to the level of choler, one of the four humours, no less, is to grant it a significance I’m not convinced it deserves.
But Dostoyevsky, ah, now there’s a rather different kettle of fish entirely, and this is where I must push back against the Russian with some vigour, not least because he would have rather enjoyed the argument.
You see, Fyodor Mikhailovich has rather misunderstood the nature of moral substances, if I may be so bold. A truly moral substance, in his framework, would be one that forces a genuine choice, not merely a binary division into those who accept and those who reject, but a genuine reckoning with one’s values. Ivan’s offering of bread to Alyosha in that tavern scene is a moment of profound existential weight: it concerns the fundamental question of suffering, of theodicy, of whether a God who permits innocent suffering can be accepted. The choice presented is not whether to consume or abstain, but whether to maintain faith in the face of cosmic injustice.
Marmite presents no such reckoning. It presents merely a matter of taste, quite literally. Some palates find it agreeable, others do not. This is not a moral division; it’s a physiological one. It’s not that one camp has chosen compassion and the other cruelty; it’s that one camp’s taste receptors have evolved to appreciate umami in its most concentrated form, whilst the other camp’s have not. There’s nothing remotely moral about it.
Moreover, and here I think Dostoyevsky, brilliant as he was, has rather missed something important about the nature of polarisation itself, a truly moral substance must offer genuine stakes. It must present a choice where something matters. But Marmite? The stakes are negligible. One may hate it with the fire of a thousand suns, yet harm comes to no one. One may love it with corresponding passion, yet civilisation does not advance. It’s a condiment, not a crucible. It divides us, yes, but it divides us in a way that is fundamentally trivial.
This is where I must gently but firmly part company with the great Russian. He sought moral weight everywhere, in bread, in suffering, in the clash of ideologies. And there is much to admire in that impulse. But sometimes, I suspect, even Dostoyevsky might have benefited from recognising that not everything that divides humanity bears the weight of moral significance. Some things divide us precisely because they are insignificant. And that, paradoxically, might be rather liberating.
So what I would say to Dostoyevsky, across whatever philosophical gulf separates the living from the dead, is this: Marmite is not a moral substance. It is, rather, a profoundly amoral one. And in that very amorality lies its peculiar charm. It allows us to be divided without consequence, to argue without stakes, to maintain our divisions with perfect good humour. In a world saturated with genuine moral questions, questions of suffering, of justice, of theodicy, the very questions that occupied your tremendous mind, there’s something rather wonderful about a substance that asks us to divide on a basis so thoroughly, so completely, so perfectly inconsequential.
That, I think, might have amused you.
After
I closed the cabinet at this point because there was nothing more to say, and because the McCormick people will probably be reading at some point in the next eighteen months, and they should be allowed to hear that closer in full silence. It is the cleanest single answer to Marmite anyone has given in this whole series. A profoundly amoral substance, and in that amorality lies its peculiar charm. I have nothing to add to that. I am not going to try.
The Bard, whom I checked in on after the session, was very gracious about being told he had been judged “the furthest remove” by the only living guest the cabinet has had.
WS: He is correct. The substance does not bear the weight I gave it. I have known that all along. It was Falstaff who would not let it go.
Me: Mr Fry says Marmite is not big enough for the four humours.
WS: Then Marmite is one of the few things in life smaller than my next play. I shall take the rebuke.
Mr Dostoyevsky was less gracious, in the way Mr Dostoyevsky is less gracious about everything, but he did concede, in a small dry voice, that the amorality argument was “not without weight”. From him this is approximately the same as a standing ovation.
Mr Adams was openly delighted to have been picked as the closest. He sent his regards to Mr Fry, with whom, as Mr Fry will know better than anyone reading this, he was very far from a stranger. The two of them bought the first Apple Macintosh computers in Europe and argued for years about which of them got there first. Mr Fry has narrated the British audiobooks of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, voiced the Book itself in the 2005 film, and has gone to some lengths to make clear that Adams told him the real reason for the number 42 and that he intends to take it to his own grave. None of this came up in tonight’s session, because the Mnemonicon was being polite and let me drive. But it would be a great oversight to close this article without saying it. Fry and Adams were close, and the cabinet ought to be the last place anybody pretended otherwise.
DNA: I got there first, by the way.
SF: He did not.
Editor’s note
For full background on the Marmite Mnemonicon, see the introduction piece from Christmas 2025 and the seven prior interviews. The short version: the Mnemonicon is a thin wrapper around siteengine_ai, a project built by my friends at Sedasoft, trained on the published writings, broadcasts, books, letters and recorded interviews of a roster of figures both dead and (in a small handful of cases) still living. Stephen Fry is the first living guest.
The substance of every answer above is from the Mnemonicon’s Fry corpus, in grounded mode. I gave the corpus three anchors as ground truth, in case they were not all present in its training:
- The famous Conservative-voting quote from A Bit of Fry and Laurie, in its original phrasing.
- The verified McCormick-Unilever deal numbers from the 31 March 2026 announcement (total ~45bn USD / ~33.5bn GBP, 15.7bn cash to Unilever, 13.8x 2025 EBITDA, closing mid-2027, with the food brands including Marmite, Hellmann’s, Knorr, Bovril and Colman’s).
- The fact that Love it or Hate it dates from 1996 and is a Bartle Bogle Hegarty creation.
The model engaged readily with all three and produced answers that read, to me, recognisably as Fry. The Latin conservare etymology unpacking of the Conservative-voting joke; the “soufflé in a thunderstorm” image; the demolition of Dostoyevsky’s moral-substance claim as a category error; the closing line that Marmite is “a profoundly amoral substance”. These are the model’s, written from his corpus.
This is, however, the first living guest in the series, and that matters. Stephen Fry can speak for himself, and unlike the dead authors he has not given his permission to be put through a corpus and quoted. I have therefore made the following provisions, which I will apply to every “Interview I Wish I Could Have” piece going forward:
- The piece is framed up front as imagined, not real.
- The model output is reproduced verbatim except for trivial tidies (em-dashes stripped, American spellings to British, RAG no-record tells stripped from dialogue).
- The article carries a standing open invitation. If Stephen Fry, or his representatives, would prefer the article to be amended or taken down, that request will be honoured at once. If he wants to come on the record and do the actual interview, the article will be replaced with the real one.
- The Mnemonicon’s living-guest mode is treated as a research tool for what the public record already says, not as a substitute for the person’s actual voice.
Nothing in this article should be cited as something Stephen Fry has actually said about Marmite, the McCormick sale, Bartle Bogle Hegarty, or Fyodor Dostoyevsky. The Conservative-voting line is genuine. Everything around it is Mnemonicon synthesis from his corpus, lightly edited.
The closing exchange about Fry and Adams is, by contrast, drawing on real biographical fact and not on the corpus. Fry and Adams were close friends from the mid-1980s. They bonded over early computing, bought (one of them first, the other claims first) the earliest Apple Macintoshes in Europe, and remained close until Adams’s death in 2001. Fry narrated the British audiobooks of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and voiced the Book in the 2005 film adaptation. Fry has spoken publicly more than once about Adams telling him the real reason behind the number 42, a secret he has said he will take to his own grave. None of this was in the Mnemonicon session. It is in the historical record, and an earlier draft of this article overlooked it in a way that was, frankly, indefensible. The correction is folded into the closer above.
Next into the Mnemonicon: still Jane Austen the moment Sedasoft fixes her embedder, and (the day the slug appears on the roster) Dickens with Mr Pickwick. There is also, on the table, a tentative second “Interview I Wish I Could Have”, with one of the other living figures the corpus carries. Suggestions, in the usual place.
