Jilly Cooper

Friday

Lara Prendergast

Why Labour’s fate will be decided in the Strait of Hormuz

36 min listen

For this week’s Edition, Lara Prendergast is joined by The Spectator's John Power, feminist campaigner Julie Bindel and former adviser to Boris Johnson – and co-host of the In The Room podcast, Cleo Watson. They explore the idea that the Strait of Hormuz, not Makerfield, will determine the fate of the current Labour government. Starmer may be facing a challenge to his authority from mayoral shapeshifter Andy Burnham, but neither the PM or the wannabe MP will be rewarded if grocery and energy prices continue to soar. How much can be done to insulate Britain from future pain? And do they trust Labour to do so? Also this week: is Wes Streeting a better option than Burnham?

Friday

Ivo Delingpole

Rivals is an ode to Thatcherite excess

Today, Rivals returns for a second series on Disney+. The first series was that rarest of phenomena: an adaptation that didn’t hate its source material. Sure, the producers decided to cram the plot with more subtle-as-a-sledgehammer politics than appears in the actual book, but you could tell they revered Jilly Cooper and the world of Rutshire and wanted to do it justice. Cooper executively produced the first series but must have been away on some days (I can’t see her let a well-heeled huntswoman pronounce the Beaufort hunt ‘Boh-fore’ rather than ‘Boh-fuht’, particularly when a major scene in the book hinges on the pronunciation of ‘Belvoir’).

Wednesday

Lloyd Evans

Should I be a Jew, Muslim or Hindu? 

Time is running out. We all have to meet our maker at some point, and although I’m fit as a fiddle I like to plan ahead. God has many brands and many names and I want to show up at the right shrine and to use the correct form of address. Technically, I don’t believe in a creator, because my rational mind accepts the agnostic theory. Existence is an attribute of entities that are bound by time and space. God is unbound by time and space, therefore existence is not among his attributes. QED. And yet something in me rejects this logic and yearns to believe – just in case. What if he really is up there? I should pick a team.

Wednesday

Rachel Johnson

I embarrassed myself at Jilly Cooper’s memorial

I am ‘sharing’ what follows as a public service. Also, as self-care in the hope that publicly shaming myself might stop me from doing it again. What can she be on about, you must be thinking, this time? My name is Rachel Johnson, and I have a chronic inability to leave the house on time, even for something I have been looking forward to for months. One example: heli-skiing in Italy with my son Oliver. All I had to do was catch a flight to Geneva whence we would be conveyed to a divine off-grid chalet via car and driver, then snowmobile. I had one job. To get us to Heathrow for the breakfast-time flight.

Thursday

Rachel Johnson

Jilly Cooper was utterly unrivalled

Jilly Cooper, the last great Englishwoman of my lifetime – after Queen Elizabeth II and Debo – has died. The lights are going out all over Rutshire. During her life, Jilly shone as an author, a friend and a person – the definition of effervescent. You had to meet her only once to become a founder member of the Jilly Cooper Adoration Society. When she wrote her last book, Tackle!, about a rural football club complete with ‘bitch invasions’ and ghastly Wags, I told her that, in a way, she was the beautiful game, only she gave entertainment to millions not by striking a ball but by putting one word in front of another on her ancient typewriter, Monica. (A friend told me she liked to write topless in the garden, with a glass of wine.

Wednesday

James Walton

A hit – but please don’t pretend it’s feminist: Disney+’s Rivals reviewed

For most of my adult life, clever, well-read, feminist women have told me how much they love Jilly Cooper. It therefore came as a bit of shock when I finally tried her novels for myself and found what they contained. There is, for example, no mistaking Jilly’s scorn for women who are fat and/or hairy, her belief that all female unhappiness can be cured by a damn good rogering, and the idea that not only is it fair enough for middle-aged blokes to lech after teenage girls, but that teenage girls rather like it when they do. (I was also slightly disconcerted by her favourite word for female genitalia – which, by way of a big clue, is the surname of the 41st and 43rd US presidents.

Thursday

Flora Watkins

How the Jilly Cooper Book Club turned toxic

The Jilly Cooper Book Club was set up about a decade ago by two friends who’d had enough of book groups where someone would insist, ‘We really must do Dostoevsky this year.’ Members of the JCBC, in a co-founder’s words, just wanted to get together to ‘drink champagne and shriek about Jilly’. ‘Book clubs are basically Mean Girls for middle-class women’ For some time, I stalked key members on Twitter before managing to wangle an invitation. My first meeting was at a large townhouse in Clapham to discuss Rivals. There was a lot of champagne and a gaggle of smart, entertaining women. One was wearing a Vivienne Westwood corset dress; another had flown in from California. It was far more glamorous and fun than the usual cheap-wine-and-crisps affairs.