‘Are you good in bed?’ Jilly Cooper on horses, lefties and which fictional character she would like to sleep with

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.

David Tennant as Tony Baddingham, ‘a nasty, nasty piece of work’, in Rivals. Photograph: Disney+

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.

‘I married a husband who’d been married before and was extremely good in bed’: Cooper with Leo in 1991.
Photograph: John Walters/Daily Mail/REX

“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.”