Dame Jilly Cooper, at 87, retains an insatiable curiosity and love for gossip. We spend an hour together in a hotel room – no, not like that! – and she machine-guns questions at me throughout: “What time do you go to bed?” “Did you play rugger at school?” “What did you vote? Are you pleased with them?” “Do you have a dog? Do you want one?” “Do you have a nice wife?” Most of these inquiries are easy enough to answer or deflect, but one leaves me genuinely slack-jawed: “Are you good in bed?”
Cooper’s occasionally profane asides are made more incongruous by the fact they are delivered by a sweet, twinkly eyed octogenarian whose feet dangle from the plump sofa on which she sits. And, as you would expect from the author of books titled Riders, Score!, Mount! and Tackle!, her love of a double-entendre knows few bounds. When I make reference to using my Dictaphone, she snickers, elongating the syllables: “Dic-ta-phone! That’s a good word.”
Our meeting was supposed to be about me posing the questions, too. Her 1988 novel Rivals, which features the second appearance of her dastardly antihero Rupert Campbell-Black and which most Cooper scholars consider her magnum opus, has now been made into a lavish, eight-part, sex-and-shoulder-pads epic by Disney+. Alex Hassell (from His Dark Materials) plays Campbell-Black, the former champion showjumper and now Tory MP and sports minister under Margaret Thatcher; on the other side of the rivalry is David Tennant’s Tony Baddingham, who has played second fiddle to Campbell-Black for years (he went to a grammar school for chrissakes!) but is now a powerful, vengeful TV boss. A fun, knockabout cast is rounded out by Aidan Turner as the Parkinson-meets-Paxman interviewer Declan O’Hara, Danny Dyer, Katherine Parkinson, and new-ish-comer Bella Maclean as Taggie, O’Hara’s daughter and the pure heart of the story.
To mark the occasion, Cooper – who is an executive producer on the series, but who had a light touch (three set visits) on the production – agreed to take on the Observer’s You Ask the Questions, made up of submissions from cultural figures and readers. “I’m terrified,” she says, when I give her a preview of her celebrity interlocutors, who include Oscar winner Emerald Fennell, writer and director of Saltburn, actor Gillian Anderson, Bridget Jones author Helen Fielding, and – checks and rechecks notes – Arsenal stalwart Tony Adams. “How did you get all these people to do this?” says Cooper at one point, astonished and touched.
The truth is, though, that Cooper has been gradually ascending to national treasure status. For years, even decades, her books, which have sold more than 11m copies in the UK alone, were dismissed as smutty bonkbusters or, perhaps even worse, relegated to that damning category of “guilty pleasures”. This was the phrase used by Rishi Sunak, a self-professed Cooper completist, to describe his admiration. “I’m a genuine fan,” he said in 2023. “You need to have escapism in your life.”
The assumption, it seems, is that as an author in Britain you can’t be credible and wildly successful. Cooper herself spelled it out in a famous quote: “The literary world is divided into two sets: people like me who long for a kind word in the Guardian and people in the Guardian who long for my sales.”
Does she still think that’s the case? “A bit,” she replies.
“God, I hate the phrase guilty pleasures,” says Olivia Laing, the novelist and cultural critic, who supplied one of the questions for Cooper. “What’s there to be guilty about? She’s a genius at description, she’s amazing at class and social comedy, she understands the complexities of desire. Let’s put her somewhere between Nancy Mitford and Trollope, with a lot more sex lobbed in. I think young people will go absolutely wild for Rivals, which I think is her masterpiece, with exactly the right scale of cast and plot. The clothes! The drama! The dogs!”
Laing is not alone in finding unanticipated depth in Cooper’s work. In 2017, the poet and academic Ian Patterson (who is also Laing’s husband) wrote a long appreciation of her in the London Review of Books in which he detailed “subplots worthy of Dickens” and a fondness for wordplay that called to mind Ali Smith. The journalist Caitlin Moran, who changed her first name as a teenager to honour a character in Rivals, and also poses a question here, recently wrote: “I genuinely think Jilly Cooper is the Jane Austen of our times.” With her predilection for domineering men, and her plots rooted in rural, upper-class privilege, it would be a stretch to describe Cooper as a feminist or a social realist, but she’s been a pioneer in certain regards: Riders, which in 1985 launched the 11-part novel series that became known as the Rutshire Chronicles, is said to be the first popular novel to espouse the use of vibrators.
Beyond the admiration for her writing, Cooper, who is flirty and quite frankly a riot, clearly inspires deep affection from those who cross her path. Many of the juiciest stories stem from the famous parties she throws at her 14th-century home in the Cotswolds. But Cooper notes that her capacity for socialising has diminished these days, especially since 2013 when her husband of 53 years, Leo, died after more than a decade living with Parkinson’s. “Because now I’m an old bid, living in Gloucester, there’s less,” she says sadly.
“She is the best,” says Laing, who first met Cooper at a lunch that involved at a “conservative estimate” 11 bottles of champagne. “She’s so kind – sends Valentines and Advent calendars to probably hundreds of people, but it always thrills me. She’s incredibly joyful and mischievous and curious. Great fun. And very supportive to other writers.”
Disney+ clearly hopes that Rivals can find a new generation of Cooper enthusiasts, perhaps already hooked on 1980s nostalgia. The series is very much in the spirit of the book: fun, titillating and glamorous; sometimes silly, but also at times deceptively insightful and witty. Classic scenes, such as the naked tennis match, where Campbell-Black first meets Taggie, are faithfully rendered. There is a question of why it has taken so long to transfer to the screen. “I think people thought it was so long and it was too difficult to make,” replies Cooper. “They would look at 800 pages and think: ‘How can we make a film out of that?’
“But I’m thrilled,” Cooper goes on. “It’s got this fantastic cast of gorgeous men, and fantastically pretty girls… lots of desirability in it now. It’s very sexy, but it’s very well-acted too. One day we had a party at my house, which was lovely. They all came and they all got on very well, which was amazing too, because they don’t usually. Men get very jealous of one another, but they didn’t in this, they all liked one another.”
For Cooper, she will be happy if Rivals offers some succour as the nights draw in and we come to terms with fresh belt-tightening under Keir Starmer’s government (a development that clearly concerns her). “Most television now is all crimes and murders,” she says. “People like love stories to cheer them up. And that’s what I’ve always wanted to do: cheer people up.”
Ian Rankin
Author
Your books have given so much pleasure to so many readers over the years that I’m sure you wouldn’t swap that success for a Booker prize (or two). But if an abductor locked you away and compelled you to write a novel to sway the Booker judges, what do you think its theme and plot would be?
God, it’s difficult. Because Ian doesn’t do Booker prize books, does he? And he’s always been lovely about my book Rivals. The Booker prize – well, I’m trying to write a novel about Sparta at the moment. So everywhere in Greece, if you committed adultery, you were killed. Not killed, but terrible things happened to you, because you were destroying the family. But in Sparta, it was OK. You were allowed to commit as much adultery as you liked, which I thought was quite interesting in ancient times.
So I thought I’d have a modern person, a lovely hero called David Dartford, and he and his friend go to Sparta to make a film today, and they have a competition to see who can commit the most adultery. That’s as far as I’ve got. Do you think that would win the Booker prize? Do you think they would like that? But I don’t really mind about Booker prizes: I’d love one, I’d adore one, but I’ve had the odd little prize.
David Tennant
Actor
Dear Jilly, your characters manage to be both very sophisticated and at the absolute mercy of their basest instincts. Which do you believe to be the most powerful pull on human nature: money, sex or power?
Oh, gosh. If you’re passionately in love it would be sex, wouldn’t it? It really would. But I think sex less now. People are all going jogging, aren’t they? Running. Everybody runs miles and miles and miles and I don’t think there’s so much sex now. So actually I think it’s money. Everybody wants money because they’re very, very worried what’s going to happen with the government and whether Putin is going to bomb us. We just want a few bob, so money is motivating people quite a lot now.
Caitlin Moran
Author
The biggest question of all, really: why do you still write? You’ve been Dame’d, you are universally loved, you’ve sold 11m books, your characters live in the heads of millions – many of them masturbating while they think about them…
What about that then? You can’t have that in your newspaper. “Mistress-baiting”, I call it. I think mistress-baiting is better. But I write because that’s what I do. When I get home tonight, I’ll write in my diary about today: an 87-year-old’s aspect of life is as interesting as an 18-year-old’s. So that’s what I do for a living. I’m going to try to write another book, but I might not be able to finish one. But I think I might try.
I’ve kept a diary for years. The earlier diaries are very, very over the top really, they are quite naughty. And I say to my children [about publishing them]: “Darling, would you like to be rich and embarrassed or poor and safe?” And they say: “Rich and embarrassed.”
I’ve been ploughing through the Rutshire Chronicles and wanted to know who your literary influences were – in Rupert Campbell-Black’s dialogue, I sensed a lot of Oscar Wilde.
Seb Tiley, Frampton Mansell, Gloucestershire
Oscar Wilde’s a wonderful writer, and very funny. I hope I’m quite funny too. But hmm, I don’t think so, no. I read an awful lot of things: Anthony Powell, gorgeous, I met him. I met John Betjeman, too. I’m reading The Odyssey at the moment, because of Sparta.
Elizabeth Hurley
Actor and model
With whom would you prefer to spend a dirty weekend: Rupert Campbell-Black, Jake Lovell [from Riders], Rannaldini [from Score!] or Declan O’Hara?
Oooh Rupert, I think. Declan is all in love with his wife. One of my favourite bits in Rivals is when Declan and his wife have a row, she’s very upset, and they go to bed in the middle of a party. And their daughter takes the sign off the ladies and puts it on the door saying: “Please do not disturb. Sex in progress.” So I don’t think Declan would be unfaithful to Maud.
Rannaldini would be very good in bed, but he was so nasty. He was a conductor, and no, he was not a nice man. I wouldn’t have liked him very much. He’d have probably told the press immediately or done something awful. And I love Jake Lovell; Jake would have been lovely in bed, but I’d like to meet Rupert, so I’d rather go to bed with Rupert. But I love Taggie and that would mean him being unfaithful to her, so perhaps I’d better go to bed with Jake.
Emerald Fennell
Actor and film-maker
Which fictional character do you most fancy (excluding your own!)?
Darcy, of course. Darcys aren’t allowed to exist now: he was handsome and arrogant and rich and all those things. And he went around like a knight rescuing Elizabeth and looking after her family and he was very discreet about it, he didn’t boast. So he would be lovely, I wouldn’t kick him out.
About 20 years ago, me and some friends were on a walking holiday in Gloucestershire and spotted you from a distance in the village of Bisley. I was tempted to shout a greeting of recognition, but thought it may seem rude. What’s your general attitude to being recognised in public?
Paul Greaves, Mexborough, South Yorkshire
What I’m allergic to, more than anything else, is droppers-in. Hate droppers-in. You are just in the middle of a really good paragraph, and someone bangs on the door and wants to come and talk to you. But people don’t recognise me as much as they used to and it’s very nice when people come and say hello. It’s an honour, isn’t it? If somebody had come up in the street to me in Bisley, I’d have been thrilled.
Should anyone who isn’t a dog person occupy any kind of important public office? Or can they simply not be trusted? I can’t recall any of the proper baddies in your books having dogs!
Nicola Dunn, Scotland
Dogs are absolutely essential. Heaven. Dogs are the best thing in the world. And baddies, of course, they don’t have dogs. Rupert was a bit cruel to his horses in Riders, but no, cruelty to animals is the worst thing in the world, awful. I don’t have a dog at the moment. When I was finishing Tackle!, Bluebell, my greyhound, died. Then I had to rewrite Tackle! for a year, so I was busy doing that. When you rescue a dog, you’ve got to give it at least three months attention to settle it in and I’ve got so much going on at the moment.
Balli Kaur Jaswal
Novelist
You finished rewriting Riders 14 years after losing the original draft on a London bus. I’m curious about how this lapse of time contributed to the rewrite. Were there shifts in the social and cultural landscape within those years that influenced your writing?
I don’t think it was 14 years, I lost it on the bus much later, sometime in the late 70s, and it was awful. Can you imagine? I’d written thousands of words of it and I took it out to lunch just to tidy up the characters or put a bit in. And, of course, I went and got a bit drunk, and I went to Selfridges and bought some scent, and got on the 22 bus. When I got home, it had gone.
I can’t even remember who I had lunch with. Is that Freudian? No, we didn’t do anything else because I went to Selfridges and came home. But it was a much better book by the end, because I concentrated on the characters and I made Jake develop more, Rupert develop more. I just spent longer on it. And there was more sex.
Helen Fielding
Author
Did you have fun working in newspapers – and did that help form your voice?
I loved working in newspapers. When I left school, I went on a paper called the Middlesex Independent. I used to go to the fire brigade, then I used to go to talk to the police, and they used to take me out for drinks. Then I would go somewhere else, to a fete. Then I moved on to nothing. I got sacked from 24 jobs after that: temporary typist and things like that, awful jobs. Then I got a job in publishing. And then I went on to the Sunday Times which was lovely, miraculous really, because Harry Evans [the editor] just let me write whatever I wanted to. I was miraculously lucky.
The first piece I wrote was saying how I hated going away for the weekend from London. I was terribly rude about people. I said, “What should I write about next week?” and Harry Evans said: “There were so many furious letters we are filling your next week’s column with furious letters.” But the access to be able to go and interview anybody you wanted to – Thatcher and people like that – was fascinating.
How the hell did you balance young children with writing?
Emily Bryce-Perkins, London
Well I adopted children, so I didn’t have to go through all that pregnancy lark. I got my Sunday Times column almost the same time Felix came, so I was frantically writing that, looking after Felix, in love with this gorgeous baby, and Leo was very helpful. Emily came along three years later, by that time we had a nanny. Our nannies were always very very pretty girls and lovely. They were friends and we all lived together in Fulham. We had bad nannies and good nannies. We would come back and find nanny in bed with the milkman or something, and the children upstairs still playing and things like that. So it was pretty chaotic, but good copy.
I love your politically incorrect characters – they’re usually the most brilliant – but if you wrote a more Observer-y character, what would you choose to write?
Sophie Venables, Southsea
Well, what about Declan in Rivals? Declan O’Hara is completely Observer. He’s left wing, he comes from humble origins in Ireland and he loves Yeats. That’s sort of Observer, isn’t it? And he’s very moral, he’s a very honourable man. When they [Rupert Campbell-Black and Tony Baddingham] start fighting for the franchise, he won’t cheat. He’s an Observer man.
Prue Leith
Restaurateur and TV presenter
What got you campaigning for a memorial statue for Animals in War? And were you happy with the eventual statue?
I was asked. My husband published military history and I was very pleased that the Imperial War Museum took me out to lunch and asked, would I like to write a book about the role animals played in war? So I thought: “God, how lovely.” But of course it was a nightmare to write because it was the saddest book ever. About 8m horses died in the first world war, the poor dogs, the camels. The cruelty was appalling, and the suffering.
But there were good bits, which I liked writing about. And when I finished it, lots of people came along and said: “Why don’t we build a sculpture in Hyde Park?” So we raised the money for it – Andrew Parker Bowles and lots of people. And the statue is lovely so I’m very proud. People say I’m a silly old pop writer, a steamy romanticist. That was a serious book, wasn’t it?
Alison Hammond
TV presenter
In Rivals, the world of ruthless TV execs and scandalous love lives makes for some wild stories. Did you ever have to fend off a scheming rival in real life, or were your personal “boardroom battles” settled with a bottle of champagne and some well-aimed wit?
Oh yes, when I was working on the Sunday Times, a journalist came up to me and said that everybody thought my column was awful and why didn’t I give it to her? I worried about it, and I asked my husband, did he think I was that bad? But no, it was completely untrue and I just wrote the next piece. And Harry Evans didn’t fire me.
Which [of your] characters most closely resembles you?
Observer reader
Oh, gosh, Lizzie in Rivals. Lizzie is a very messy writer and lives down by the lake, she’s a bit like me. She loves her animals and she’s naughty. But I don’t think anybody could be so hopeless as me really.
Do you consider your books being called “bonkbusters” complimentary or denigrating?
YorkshireExPat
It’s funny. It’s hysterical. I don’t really worry about bonkbusters. But someone described them once as “steamy romances” and I thought that was ghastly. Steamy romance, no. Something like Rivals, there’s so much more.
Olivia Laing
Author
Dearest Jilly, you are widely regarded as the nicest, most generous of writers. How have you managed to maintain that openness and kindness in what can be the tough world of publishing?
I’m probably beastly behind people’s backs. I try not to be beastly to their faces. But no, I was married to a publisher, Leo, who died in 2013. When I gave him a Sunday Times piece to read, he’d say: “That’s crap, darling. Go back and write it again.” So I had a judge at home. But also if anybody was horrible to me he would come in and say: “Stop it. Don’t be horrible to my wife.” So I was protected. Lucky.
I’ve loved your books for so long, your characters just jump off the page. Where do you get the inspiration for their fabulous names?
Gil Bailey, Brighton
Oh gosh, I don’t know. I have to be careful, because with Rivals, Tony Baddingham was called Bullingham originally and there was somebody who thought it was him. But Baddingham is much better. He’s a nasty, nasty piece of work. But that was a good joke in the book, it said he was a devil, he had a forked tongue and that’s why he was so good at oral sex. Dare you to put that in!
Gillian Anderson
Actor
You’ve said your big break came in 1969 when the Sunday Times published your piece on being a hopelessly undomesticated young wife. If you were going to write something today, to have the same effect, what would it be about?
Tricky that, isn’t it? I’m a hopelessly undomesticated geriatric these days. I met somebody the other day who suddenly got a new man at 89 after her husband died, and she had her first orgasm at 89. It was absolutely wonderful. That’d be quite an amazing thing to write about. That would get people going.
Tony Adams
Former football player and manager
Why haven’t you invited me to play naked tennis? Love Tony.
It’s a very naughty book Rivals, there’s lots going on, nude tennis and all sorts. We’ve got a tennis court at home; we’ve never done it, though. It’s the worst tennis court you’ve ever, ever seen, it’s complete chaos, I’ve just let it go to seed. But Tony’s absolutely gorgeous and he has a beautiful wife and they live locally in a heavenly house, and they’re really, really nice.
As a teenager, most of my knowledge about women came from Joni Mitchell records and Jilly Cooper novels. It wasn’t a bad education. What pieces of literature/art/music were most formative for you as a human being and as a writer?
Michael, Yorkshire
Anthony Powell, Proust, Beatrix Potter. Music, it’s Beethoven, Brahms. I lost my virginity to Brahms Symphony No 2. Yes, I did, that’s good, isn’t it? Art, I like Stubbs and horse pictures. I’ve got lots of pictures at home… Christ, I don’t want to get burgled so I’d better shut up.
Victoria Coren Mitchell
Author and TV presenter
I don’t think I’ve ever found a book I enjoyed more than your sparkling early romances – Imogen, Emily, Prudence and so on. There are photos of beautiful women on all the covers. As a child, I was told that they were all you, wearing different hats and makeup. To this day, I stare at those covers a few times a year and can never work it out. Is it you?
It was me! Makeup artists, I think, are the Raphaels or Stubbs’ of the modern world. They could transform boots into absolutely amazing beauties. And I had a marvellous makeup person. I looked like the heroine of each of them and they just made me up different, which is amazing. And I was put on the front. That was a long time ago, in the 1970s, when I was very young. But they’re sweet stories, they have very happy endings, too. I love happy endings.
Sara Cox
BBC Radio 2 presenter and novelist
I love being around horsey people – they’re a real breed of their own so I’ve always loved your books! I have an Irish sports horse now and have ridden since I was tiny. What is it about these magnificent animals and the folk that inhabit the equestrian world that inspires and fascinates you?
When I was a child, we went to stay in Cornwall, first holiday after the war. We got down there and there was a sweet pony called Rufus. I was mad about ponies, and I persuaded my parents to buy it for me. We were living in Cobham, Surrey, and I said to all my friends at school: “Come on, my pony’s arriving today, you’ve all got to come and meet Rufus.” I was terribly up myself.
Anyway, I went home, and there was Rufus in the field. So I opened the gates: “Rufus! Rufus!” And this pony rushed up and bit me all over. Really badly bit me. I was in floods, and so Rufus was sold. Rufus was then properly gelded.
When we got to Yorkshire, I got a pony called Willow. Willow was the complete love of my life, and did very well in shows. But when I was about 13, 14, I was at the Pony Club and this girl couldn’t get her horse Geldy – awful name – over the jumps, so I said: “Get off, I’ll get her over the parallel bars.” I got on to Geldy – trot, trot, trot – and Geldy stopped. I went into the parallel bars and dislocated my arm, which trapped the nerve. I was in hospital for a month or so, and I was paralysed for a long time and couldn’t ride. I could never get my nerve back, so I couldn’t showjump any more, and I suppose I wrote Riders and Rivals to make up for it. [As Proust wrote] “The true paradises are the paradises that we have lost.”
I live half a mile from you but have never seen you in Morrisons or Aldi. Do you use Waitrose, which is further away?
Andy Ferrari, Amberley, West Sussex
No, I use Tesco. Mr Tesco delivers to our house. I haven’t been to Morrisons. Somebody else does my shopping for me because I’m so old.
Poppy Jay
Presenter of the Brown Girls Do It Too podcast
If you could go back in time and give 25-year-old Jilly sex advice, what would you say?
Sex advice at 25? Well, I got married at 24, and I married a husband who’d been married before and was extremely good in bed. Leo was absolutely wonderful and he gave me all the advice I needed, really. Sometimes I probably read too late and didn’t come to bed when he wanted to go to bed, but I can’t really think of any advice I’d give myself.
Jilly, I have loved you since I got hold of my mum’s copy of Rivals when I was about 12! Thank you for the wonderful stories, especially Imogen, which I still reread every year on the beach in France. As one of those sandal-wearing lefties, can I ask what you have against us? We’re not all terrible wishy-washy folk who never wash!
Nic Jones, Brighton
No, no! We’ve had Declan. And in Tackle!, Elijah, my hero, is a lovely lefty. No, I didn’t mean to be beastly about them. I love lefties, I went on the Aldermaston march [against nuclear weapons] when I was young. And I voted socialist for a long time, and then I sort of levelled up and voted Tory later.
If you could sum up your books as a dish, what would it be?
Louise McCahery, Belgium
Yes, yes, yes! Coq au vin! There’s cock, lots of sex, and drinking!
