Jilly Cooper: ‘I was nearly raped by another author in the back of a taxi’

“The hand?” asks Jilly Cooper, glancing at the cover of her romping 1980s classic Riders – at the pert behind vacuum-packed into white jodhpurs and the swarthy male hand “copping a feel” of the woman’s right cheek. “No, I never did meet ‘the hand’, but I can tell you that it’s done quite a bit of wandering over the years.”

It’s hard to believe that the first of her bestselling romance series, the Rutshire Chronicles, will turn 40 next year. Although I do remember stealing my best friend’s mother’s copy as a teen and sniggering over the naughty bits at the bottom of the garden.

Since then, the Riders cover has become a pop culture leitmotif, alongside other Cooper classics (you’ll remember a similarly swarthy hand reaching for a woman’s thigh beneath the table on the cover of Rivals); the journalist and author a national treasure, who has sold over 11 million books in the UK alone.

Today, with the Disney+ adaptation of Rivals coming up (starring Aidan Turner, David Tennant and Danny Dyer), 87-year-old Cooper to be given a damehood for her services to literature and charity next month, and this week’s Spectator splashing on how a “Jilly Cooper Book Club” (set up by a group of fans who apparently had a spectacular falling out) “turned toxic”, we seem to be in the midst of a whole new Jilly-surgence. (Although all she’ll say on this is: “I was only ever deeply flattered that anyone would set up a book club in my name.”)

Certainly, no interviewee aside from Sir David Attenborough has prompted such exclamations of envy from friends. “Jilly Cooper! Can I come?” But wait: what does she mean, “wandering”?

“‘The hand’ has moved several times over the years,” says Cooper, whom I have met on a few occasions over the decades and find a little frailer today, yet still sparkling-eyed and fluffy-haired, dressed in black leggings and a light blue jumper. “When it was first published it was sort of mid-bum. Then, I had a rather respectful publisher about 10 years ago, when we published the 30th anniversary edition, and they moved the hand off the bum. And now…” We both peer more closely at the bottom, as though willing that hand to wander in real time, “the hand’s actually straight down the crack, see?” More of a cupping than a petting, I agree. Taking a sip of tea, Cooper murmurs: “A cupping, yes.”

I’ve travelled to her 14th-century home near Bisley, Gloucestershire, not just to discuss the wandering hands of men and time, and certainly not to discuss the Disney+ version of Rivals, on which she is an executive producer, “because although I have seen the first episode and it is absolutely thrilling, I’m not allowed to talk about it”. No, I’m nominally here to discuss her 50th and latest book, Tackle! – and never has it been more difficult to get an author to focus on promoting her novel.

Like the house she has lived in for 40 years, which is gloriously un-showhome-like, with busy William Morris wallpaper, peeling paint, and every inch of every surface covered in oil paintings, cartoons, novelty coasters, throw cushions, books and ornaments, Cooper’s conversation is a series of joyful distractions. But at least the tech distractions are kept to a minimum. There’s no internet here and scarcely any mobile phone coverage. The author admits she “wouldn’t even know how to open a laptop”, preferring to do her 11am-5pm writing stints on a trusty old typewriter named Monica, “whose ribbon is so worn out, I can now hardly make out the print on the page”.

For half an hour, we ricochet from my marriage to hers: how much she still misses her late husband of 53 years, Leo, who died in 2013, aged 79, after a decade-long battle with Parkinson’s. “We had so much laughter and fun”.

How comforting she has found having her two children, property developer Felix, 55, and make-up artist, Emily, 52, and five grandchildren, living “just a cricket ball’s throw away”. From the institution of marriage in general – “relationships and marriage are two of the best things life has to offer” – to one of her favourite subjects: adultery.

When I tell the author how in the UK, more women are now cheating on their husbands than ever before, her face lights up. “Gosh, how riveting! Presumably men are getting more and more insecure, and women are getting more and more powerful. But basically, I think everyone cheats because they want to go to bed with another person. Because of lust. Have you ever cheated on Piers?”

Suddenly, we’re onto cosmetic surgery. “All this fiddling with your face! I don’t think cosmetic surgery always works. I am not mad about those huge trout pouts bearing down on one, and those wonderfully smooth complexions tend to make people’s faces so rigid and unsmiling. Frankly, I would rather have my spirits lifted than my face.” And from there, onto exercise, and how much I “take”. Because Cooper has a theory she’s keen to share: “I’m convinced the reason people aren’t having as much sex is because everybody takes so much exercise. All these people who go out and run and run. Everybody is running nowadays, and if they’re not, they’re going to the gym. And how can you possibly have sex when you’re so exhausted? I think men and women are losing their libido because of it all.”

By the time she starts telling me about a recent one-to-one with Rishi Sunak, we’re both damp-eyed with mirth. After going public as a die-hard fan, the PM invited Cooper to No 10 a couple of months ago. “He was absolutely adorable,” she enthuses. “Very handsome too. He’d read all my books from Riders onwards, so we had half an hour together in Downing Street, just chatting.”

The furious pace of our gossiping only slackens when we pause to consider whether it would be indecent to start on the champagne at noon. “Let’s go with 12.15pm,” Cooper finally decides, worried she might otherwise “be blotto” before lunch (egg sandwiches prepared by Carol, her carer and companion).

Born Jilly Sallitt in Hornchurch, Essex, to what she describes as an “upper middle-class family” – her great-great-grandfather founded The Leeds Mercury and her father was a brigadier who worked at the nearby Ford Motor Company until the outbreak of the Second World War – Cooper fell in love with books at the age of four, when she was taught to read by her mother. Mary Sallitt suffered from manic depression, but was a voracious reader, and remained deeply invested in her daughter’s literary life until the day she died.

The family moved to London in the mid-1950s, where Cooper got a job as a cub reporter on the Middlesex Independent.

After stints in public relations, copywriting and publishing, she caught the eye of Sunday Times Magazine editor Godfrey Smith, who gave her a column in 1969, which “amazingly lasted for 13 years” and led to the publication of her first (non-fiction) book, How to Stay Married.

It’s a good hour before I finally get Cooper on to her most recent work. Tackle! is the 11th instalment of the Rutshire Chronicles, and her caddish hero, Rupert Campbell-Black, is back – and buying the local football team.

She gets up to show me the signed and framed shirt Gareth Southgate sent her – “To Jilly, congratulations on finishing Tackle!” – and starts regaling me with anecdotes about how the idea was seeded by a lunch with Alex Ferguson, “who I thought would be rather stern and autocratic, but turned out to be sweet and very giggly”, and how “totally hooked” she – a lifelong Manchester City fan – is on football now. Although she does worry about footballers having to be such good boys now, she tells me: “They’re very attractive and I’m sure they can pull anyone they want, but now they have to be so well behaved. They’re role models, aren’t they – not roll in the hay models. It’s such a shame everyone has to be a role model now…”

That’s one problem Campbell-Black will never have to face. As he tries to revive his languishing local football club, the Searston Rovers – based on her local Forest Green Rovers – there are plenty of shenanigans and some joyous fun-poking at woke culture and MeToo. This includes one female character announcing “I can’t cope with all this MeToo business” (before “undoing another top button”) and a cat brilliantly-named “MewToo”.

Cooper has spoken out about MeToo in the past, and does worry, she says, “that these days, if you put a hand on a woman’s shoulder, you’re about to rape her. But what I find the saddest thing of all, is that now some gentle pass you made 30 years ago could come back at you, and then your career will go, your marriage will go: everything will go.” She shrugs. “The past is another country.”

I love to picture the colour draining from her sensitivity reader’s face, I tell her, referring to the editors now paid to read through manuscripts, looking for perceived offensive content. “Oh, they will have found all sorts of things,” she agrees with a chuckle. “Publishers are wonderful, but there’s been an awful lot of rewriting with this one.”

Cooper worries “that everyone is so very respectful now – or at least concerned about seeming respectful”, and we segue onto the vogue for editing past classics, to Roald Dahl, and the removal of certain words describing his characters as “fat” and “crazy”.

“What’s wrong with fat?” Cooper asks. “I mean for one thing, everybody is fat.” Her eyes widen and her voice drops: “People really are enormous now. It’s terribly odd what’s going on.”

I wonder, does she ever worry about being cancelled? Just the other day I was reading about how she was one of just a few “uncancellable” figures. “It’s more that I just don’t want to upset people,” she says. “I never used to worry about that when I was young. Actually, I was reading some of my old Sunday Times columns the other day and I was such a bitch! I used to really carve people up in interviews. But now I find that I want to be kind.”

I’ve never found her writing vicious. It’s too human for that. And while young people may enjoy portraying Cooper’s generation as bigoted when it comes to sex and gender, this is certainly not true of her. There’s a gay affair in Tackle!, gay characters in Appassionata, Polo and Wicked!, and today, the author fully accepts that sexuality can be fluid. “What always intrigues me is these complete crushes one used to have on girls at school, and then overnight one would switch to being heterosexual.”

Cooper’s was Julie. “I was 13 and at a girls’ boarding school when the sixth-formers put on a play, Tobias and the Angel. When the angel [Julie] came on stage I was suddenly knocked sideways by love for her. Infatuated, utterly bewildered. I couldn’t sleep at night and by day filled her locker with sweets and wild flowers. Julie however totally ignored me – so it was a sort of one-way Sapphic.”

None of this is unexpected. More than sexual, Cooper has clearly always been a highly sensual human being. But what does surprise me is the softening of her stances on various issues, despite the provocative statements and the jokes. When we return to MeToo later in the interview, for example, she agrees that “it is seriously awful for women – terrifying – to be jumped on by a man”. She can still vividly remember a harrowing experience when she was working for a publishers in her 20s. “I was taken out to lunch by a man and on the way back in a cab he jumped on me and pulled my clothes apart. It was awful. I was terrified.” She takes a breath. “When I got back to the office I was in floods of tears and told my manager that someone had just tried to rape me.”

Cooper’s boss took her into his office, gave her a cup of tea and insisted she tell him who had done this, so that they could report it. “But then, when I told him the man’s name and he realised it was one of our authors… I was ushered out of that office in two seconds. So yes,” she nods, “I think [MeToo] has been good in many respects.”

On the subject of class too, she has mellowed. One of her earliest and most famous non-fiction books, Class – an irreverent view of the British class system published in 1979 – prompts a shudder and a whisper of: “I daren’t look at it now.” Yet 45 years later, I tell her, we are still obsessed with it. Just look at the success of the latest gravel-drive blockbuster, Saltburn? “It’s very interesting, how it’s still there,” she muses. “I think we should redefine it. In Class, I had my characters Harry Stow-Crat, Mr and Mrs Nouveau-Richards, Samantha and Gideon Upward, but the thing that really upset everyone was the Definitely-Disgustings.” She pauses. “It is funny though, isn’t it, because the moment you meet someone, you definitely assess [their class] a little bit, don’t you?”

How to Stay Married makes her wince for a different reason. “We had only been married for seven years!” she says with a laugh. And she and Leo – a military book publisher she first met as a child in Yorkshire and then again at a dinner party in London – did subsequently have to face some challenges: their inability to have children and the drawn-out adoption process, the “brief fling” she has admitted to having and the much longer affair her husband had with the publisher Sarah Johnson. But today she only thinks of herself as “blessed to have found him”. “Parkinson’s is so awful, but at least you have time to say goodbye.”

Reaching for a photograph of “my Leo”, she shows me how “beautiful” and “macho” he was.  “My father was terribly macho too, and my brother, Tim [who was three years older]. But you know men have changed,” she says mournfully. “They used to be allowed to be macho, and I think macho’s out now, isn’t it?” I confirm that this is indeed the case. “It’s a tragedy, really. I think macho is lovely. One really does want strong, masculine men – men like Clark Gable. I like tall, dark and handsome men. But also tall, blond and handsome.” She frowns. “I like all attractive men.” She shakes her head. “Oh, I just love men. Adore them.”

Has she thought about dating at all? “No,” she says. “Although, if someone heavenly appeared on the horizon…” We both stare out at the rolling hills, half-expecting some man in breaches to gallop up on a white steed. “I love romance. I am a very romantic person.” Which is partly why she continues to write novels, she says, breaking off to tell me about the book she is now working on, “and a couple of heavenly men who go off to Sparta with a party of 14 and have a competition to see who can commit the most adultery over this one holiday”.

Ask Cooper whether she has ever thought of writing a royal romp, and she gives a vigorous shake of the head. “I think they’ve been overdone, don’t you?” Yes. And, of course, the Queen is a great friend of hers, which might make it tricky. The pair met at a private dinner party years ago, and found they had much in common. “Camilla’s so lovely,” Cooper enthuses, “and working so hard. I think it’s so sad what they’re going through at the moment. Such a tragedy.”

Does she think the Royal family will struggle to remain relevant over the next few years? “We all loved the late Queen and Prince Philip so much, and I think we do still love the royals like mad, but nowadays there are so many celebrities around, so… Still, there has been such an outpouring of support for them…” She glances at the many “Congratulations” cards lining her bookshelves. “I’ve got this damehood coming up, and I don’t know who will do it…”

She would love it if the Queen were there, next month, “because then we could grin at each other. And what am I going to wear?” she frets. “Either way I’m not eating between now and then. But honestly, I can’t believe it,” she says, pulling herself up straight when I tell her that most people assumed she would be made a Dame decades ago. “No,” she says firmly. “Because I’m sort of frivolous. I don’t write literature, but I hope my books have given people joy. I hope they make people happy.” She breaks off, smiles: “But I am, you know. I am frivolous.”

‘Tackle!’ by Jilly Cooper (Penguin, £9.99) is out in paperback on May 9