#is kendall aware of her grey roots? something to think about.

[shivroy]

would transitioning save them? FUCK no. happy pride ❤️

[noahfence1d]

On a muggy May morning in a penthouse in Battersea, southwest London, the delectable self-styled “chef and food consultant” Tess Ward is slumped on an enormous grey sofa, cradling a cup of peppermint tea and musing on the downsides of social media.

“Snapchat I’ve deleted, Twitter — don’t really do it,” she says wearily, her home counties accent as sharp as mandolined celeriac. “I’m even a little bit out of love with Instagram. At the moment I’m getting a lot of direct messages there, but I respectfully choose not to reply to them, because they’re all, like, er . . . interesting. I want a break,” she wails, her tones turning mock-northern. “I just want a break.”

Why is Ward so disillusioned? She’s a key member of today’s cohort of gorgeous, uber-connected food writers/chefs/wellbeing gurus (think “Deliciously” Ella Mills of the Sainsbury dynasty and former models Jasmine and Melissa Hemsley), following the favoured career path for upper-crust pretty things, whom the satirical website the Daily Mash unkindly categorised under the headline “Sexy posh girls unveil bullshit fad diet”.

As in all their cases, Instagram has been key to building Ward’s brand: she has nearly 130,000 followers, mesmerised by her soft-focus lifestyley/foodie shots of toasted almonds and beetroot salad, Ward doing yoga on a Yucatan beach, sweet potato and avocado brunches, Ward sunbathing on the shores of Lake Como and looking foxy at the polo in a bright-red floral Gucci shirt . . .

This last shot, posted early last week, nearly broke social media, not to mention a million teenage hearts — and brought her an additional 50,000 followers. It was apparent confirmation that Ward was — as had been rumoured for days — going out with Harry Styles of the boyband One Direction. Only four days earlier he had been seen about town in an identical £530 shirt.

That same day Ward was papped in the passenger seat of an Audi being driven by Styles, whose first solo album was about to be released. Instantly, she became a 21st-century Yoko Ono, loathed by loyal Directioners who are notorious for making voodoo dolls and sending death threats to any woman with whom their idols are spotted socialising.

They started trolling Ward’s social media. An innocuous Instagram snap of her mango and honey ice cream (dairy-free, obvs) attracted more than 3,000 comments along the lines of “Go awaaay”, “Ew”, “This looks disgusting” and “social climber”.

On Amazon her cookbook The Naked Diet, which had so far received about a dozen four and five-star reviews, overnight attracted a tranche of one-star write-ups, along the lines of “boring” and “unoriginal”.

“It’s been so weird, the hate messages . . . very bizarre,” Ward sighs, her fragile frame hunched. “I’m not the kind of person who’s interested in fame and if you’re put in an environment which you don’t understand and you can’t control and you don’t want, it’s horrible.”

She bites her lip; her doll-like, tanned face bleak. “Reporters have turned up at my mum’s house several times, at my old house. I just want to do what I love and that’s cook, it really is.”

So what’s going on? Is Ward, 27, going out with Styles, 23?

“I literally don’t have anything to say about that,” she sighs, as her PR snaps: “My clients don’t talk about their personal lives.”

Many distraught Directioners are convinced there’s nothing to talk about because this is all a publicity stunt to flog cookbooks (although what’s in it for Styles is less clear). Last weekend, Ward attended his “secret” London gig until, according to one fan who claimed on Twitter to have been standing near by, she was told by Styles’s people: “That’s enough, you can leave now.” In other words, her presence had been noted, job done.

If this is all a ploy to boost Ward’s profile, I doubt she would be so visibly shaken. Shortly after we meet, Ward disables her Instagram messaging facility, posting: “For everyone following and messaging me, I am thankful but please be kind to me. All I want is to share beautiful food with you all.”

Assuming there is a relationship, then Styles, who is refusing to comment, is a lucky chap. Because, even compared to his arm-long list of exes (Taylor Swift, Kendall Jenner, Caroline Flack, Pixie Geldof, Rod Stewart’s daughter and someone from Made in Chelsea), Ward is a catch, ridiculously pretty in frayed jeans and an embroidered denim jacket, bobbed fair hair, endearingly darker at the roots, framing an angelic face — a testament to the power of good genes and quinoa.

She’s also — when not brooding on her role as Britain’s most-hated woman — extremely likeable: voluble and friendly with a dry sense of humour.

“People can be so weird,” she continues on the social media theme. “You post a salad and they’re like, ‘That’s not nutritionally balanced.’ I like to be playful. There’s a slight puritanism about the way a lot of people post about food — they’ll be like, ‘I’m eating this salmon bowl and it’s got all these omegas, it’s perfect for getting your skin to glow.’ I’m like, ‘I don’t care! It’s a f***ing salmon salad!’ ” She frowns as she scrolls through comments on her Instagram feed. “Here’s this pasta recipe I’ve written. ‘Even if it’s not perfect it’s good when it’s made with love’ — that’s a bit too earnest. I was like, ‘Ew! God, far too nice for me.’ ”

Part of London’s It crowd (she is forever being snapped at parties with minor royals and the models Suki Waterhouse and Amber Le Bon and was, allegedly, introduced to Styles via “mutual friends”), Ward has walked here in Battersea from the house she shares in west London. “I used to live alone, but when you cook, you need people around to offload the food.” She’s looking to buy in hipper Stoke Newington, nearer the buzzing bars and restaurants.

Her parents — she has a brother, who’s a student — divorced when she was ten. Her father, who lives between west London and Oxfordshire, works for a multinational property company. “Dad’s a bit nuts; he wears tweed suits and bright purple shirts and odd socks always,” she says, smiling, scrolling through her phone to find a picture. “Look, here he is going to a fancy-dress party, dressed as bouillon, so in a chicken hat.”

Her mother, who lives in Oxford, is a yoga teacher. “She’s very spiritual, she sends me pictures of her in her crystal healing area. So cute. I have the best parents. They’re very progressive, bohemian, they’ve always been like, ‘Do whatever you like, it’s your body, it’s your life’, but everything has consequences and as a result I’ve always been very responsible.”

Ward was a tomboyish child, happiest helping her maternal grandfather, a farmer, to “pluck pheasants and gut fish’’. She attended a Quaker boarding school, then a small private day school for girls in Oxford. “I hated it. I was disruptive and got in so much trouble. I really didn’t feel the cookie-cutter school system was for me.”

However, she flourished at the local private sixth form college and ended up following a classic upper-middle-class path of reading history of art at the University of Leeds where, with a lot of free time, she held “a lot of dinner parties”.

On graduating, she did some modelling “but that didn’t sing for me”, so studied classical French cooking at Le Cordon Bleu, before working at various establishments including the Ritz and River Cottage.

“Cooking for people didn’t really do it for me. You’re always making the same stuff, and in a restaurant the hours are long and it’s hard physical labour. You’re on your feet for at least 14 hours a day and I’m not very big — my parents were like, ‘You’re quite pale and weathered.’ ”

She started reviewing restaurants for Grazia magazine, consulting brands such as Fortnum & Mason and Grey Goose. In the future she is hoping to open a restaurant and write a sequel to The Naked Diet, whose title reflects Ward’s “stripped back” approach to unprocessed food.

Like Ella Mills, Ward has been “mindful” of what she eats as a result of health issues — travelling alone around India on her gap year she picked up a parasite that was eventually cured by a clinical nutritionist (she has done an online course at the Institute of Integrative Nutrition). She’s allergic to soya and avoids wheat: “It gives me a stomach ache.” She doesn’t eat dessert much because “I don’t have a terribly sweet tooth” and dislikes melted cheese — “so pizza’s out”. She has just given up red meat “more for the planet than for dietary reasons. Other than that, I’m pretty relaxed.”

The #avotoast world is an increasingly crowded one and can be bitchy. Last year she had a skirmish with the Bake Off finalist Ruby Tandoh, after Ward tweeted: “Let’s all make baking books and wonder why the world has health and sugar addiction problems.” Tandoh lashed back calling her a “denizen of the weight loss industry” on Twitter, screenshotting a reference to a “Skinny Bitch” cooking class Ward had hosted.

“A lot of girls in food aren’t so nice,” Ward says. “Though the Hemsleys really are good girls. I went to their first book launch when I was submitting my first draft, looked around and thought, ‘This is the beginning of a thing, isn’t it?’

“Ella’s book was coming out, it became a wave and the media lumped us into one category. But I was very aware that these were girls telling people what they should eat. I’m not a qualified nutritionist, I’m a chef — my standpoint is food being delicious primarily and secondarily what’s good for you.

“Healthy living is a trend and that’s more my thing than clean eating, which is a fad and something I feel I was pulled into. The vegan and the clean can perpetuate a lot of other problems, which aren’t good.”