Sex and shenanigans among upper-class Brits

Welcome to the world of Jilly Cooper—which just got even more crowded thanks to Disney+’s new eight-part adaptation of her 1988 “bonkbuster” Rivals. 

From its opening scene in which antihero lothario Rupert Campbell-Black joins the mile high club with his journalist lover in a Concorde toilet, Cooper’s glorious chronicle of sex and skullduggery is receiving a rapturous reception.

She sells books by the bucketload but manages to be immune to both cancel culture and class snobbery. The Guardian, that bastion of liberal piety, runs fawning interviews with the author while the backlash which greeted Downton Abbey and Merchant-Ivory upper-crust goings-on has left Cooper untouched. 

So how does she do it? 

Jilly is a Hilarious Satirist

Cooper got her writing break as a columnist for the UK Sunday Times and that reporter’s instinct has never left her. Take her 1979 non-fiction book Class where she records an Etonian schoolboy lamenting, “If one is caught in bed with a girl one gets chucked out but if you’re caught with a boy, you get two hours gardening.” Or this exchange between wealthy polo patron Bart Alderton and lover Chessie France-Lynch in the 1991 novel  Polo: “What do you think I was born under?” asked Bart. Chessie laughed. “A pound sign, I should think.”

Jilly is Wickedly Edgy

In spite of Cooper’s extensive social network, she has sailed close to the wind with her archness and acerbity. When it comes to the royal family, Cooper has long been close to King Charles and Queen Camilla. Yet she indiscreetly told The Oldie that the late Queen Elizabeth II once asked her, “Do you write a bit?” Cooper concluded, “I don’t think she read much.” 

Then there’s the Princess Michael of Kent episode. In 1986 Cooper interviewed Marie Christine, wife of the Queen’s first cousin, Prince Michael of Kent, for the  Mail on Sunday. The ensuing article was so cutting that Princess Michael of Kent—objecting to being portrayed as “pushy”—sent Cooper 30 pieces of silver in an envelope, a reference to Judas Iscariot’s biblical betrayal.

Cooper has acknowledged principally basing debauched rogue Campbell-Black on the Queen’s ex-husband, Brigadier Andrew Parker Bowles, society tailor Rupert Lycett Green, and the late Michael Howard, 21st Earl of Suffolk. Campbell-Black also bears traces of Cooper’s late husband Leo, her late father Brigadier W.B. Sallitt and notorious playboy the late David Somerset,11th Duke of Beaufort.

Jilly is Resilient

Cooper has certainly had her fair share of public setbacks. Her late husband Leo Cooper publicly cheated on her but the couple stayed together. In the pre-electronic era, she left the original draft of her novel Riders on a London bus, only returning to write it a decade later. “Everyone thinks Jilly is seriously loaded but actually her latter novels didn’t sell as well and she spent a fortune on looking after Leo when he had Parkinson’s disease,” a friend tells Digital Party. “Her son Felix looks after her finances but she’s an executive producer on Rivals so will get a lovely payday from that.”

Jilly is Ahead of the Curve

Cooper anticipates the zeitgeist. Rivals documents a battle over a TV franchise for the fictional Corinium TV which foreshadowed Margaret Thatcher’s 1990 Broadcasting Act where the then Prime Minister’s preferred bidders lost out. Her 2006 novel Wicked! revolves around a private fee-paying school’s attempt to take over the local free school.

Presently Britain is torn apart by the new Labour government’s introduction of value-added tax for private schools that has fuelled fears of state schools being overrun with former private school pupils.

Jilly is Nice

Cooper’s charm is legendary. British journalists cherish the thank-you notes they receive when they mention her in dispatches. One gossip columnist acquaintance of Cooper’s was amazed she drove all the way to London from the Cotswolds to attend his birthday party. 

She has never complained about the rough ride she got from literary critics over her “bonkbusters”. Even friends could be sniffy. Her pal, the late  Dance to the Music of Time novelist Anthony Powell, wrote in his diaries, “Jilly’s novels [are] designed for extensive sales rather than highbrow reading.”

Yet she never sold out in the manners department. Social guru Peter York, who co-wrote 1982 bestseller The Official Sloane Ranger Handbook, which cited Cooper’s “jolly super romances”, tells Digital Party, “Jilly is the most engaging person and she was so loyal to her view of the world—the infatuated Sloane world. Well done Disney+ for recognizing people have stopped feeling guilty about the excesses of the 1980s—even though that behavior now would get you put away! It’s delicious fun and wonderful for Jilly to have this revival.”