Tackle!: Let the sabotage and scandals begin in the new instant Sunday Times bestseller

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In the old days her books were passed round by teenagers sharing the dirty bits – perhaps young people don’t need that in today’s world. But the appeal, then and now, isn’t only the sex: it’s the access to a glamorous world of high-end jobs and lives and luxury trappings that readers don’t see every day, all relayed with Jilly’s signature warmth, humour and good-heartedness. Nor do the rival local football team, their duplicitous chairman and their corrupt dealings make things easier – let the scandals, sabotage and seductions begin… On top of that, everyone is judged on their thinness (a character called Harmony is a “very good but rather large Assistant Head Lass” at the stables) and their looks, and any sensible woman would run a mile from rude Rupert IRL – he is an overbearing, thoughtless bully, and his own press officer says he is “going to be brilliant at running a football club – he’s so good at swearing”. His daughter persuades him to buy a failing local football team, so that he can sign up her star striker boyfriend. Rupert is not a football fan, but his competitive streak means he immediately sets about getting them to the top of the Premier League, on the way dealing with a corrupt rival team and, inevitably, a group of Wags lusting after him. Jilly Cooper was made a CBE in 2018 (Photo: John Stillwell/Getty) But outsider or not, character always shines through. If they’re a good egg, they’ll be fine. Class boundaries are melted by personality and likeability: the double-barrelled “darlings” live in happy harmony with the WAG-gy “babes”. In another Cooper hallmark, tragedy strikes the cast around Searston Rovers. Yet nobody wallows in self-pity; good things happen to the deserving people (and dogs). If only real-life were as just.

A female journalist says, “I can’t cope with all this MeToo business. In my day, you said ‘eff off’ if men were awful, and ‘eff on’ if they were lush,” and her reward is that her male interview subject puts a caressing hand on “a thigh fake-tanned more orange than the car”.

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She is to humans what David Attenborough is to animals’ … Jilly Cooper at home. Photograph: Thousand Word Media/Alamy Always wear cashmere When you think everyone is fantastically attractive, that helps. It’s 38 years since Rupert appeared in Riders. He is now 67, which means we met him when he was 29, although he came off more like 35. Never mind; age cannot wither him, being the handsomest man in the world. Of course, everyone biologically related to him, children and grandchildren, is outstandingly beautiful, as is his wider circle and household. It would besmirch his supremacy were he to stand next to anyone not handsome. Really, though? Could one man invent these things, bring them to market and get rich enough to buy a football team? I have always doubted Cooper’s understanding of the business sphere. I had my doubts during Rivals about whether success was as easy as walking into a fundraising bid with three buttons of your shirt undone, rather than two. But, at the end of the day, she is rich and I am not. Class is complicated Valent Edwards says “bluddy” because he is from Yorkshire, but how else would you pronounce “bloody”? He also says “fooking”, but what accent is that? Paris Alvaston, trying to teach public schoolboy wannabe footballers how to talk common (because “footballers resent public schoolboys”), advises that they start saying “pass” to rhyme with “gas”, by which I guess one infers that the working classes of the home counties also have to adjust their accents to play football because they are only allowed to come from Leicester.

Horses also hold a lot of the dynastic energy, as each prized thoroughbred sires another who looks just like him and wins stuff. Yet, in the end, they are dispensable; they can be bitten to death by other horses (Love Rat in Mount!) without disrupting the fundamentally romantic atmosphere. So, they are almost like a dialectical echo, the melodrama against the drama, the depth against the lightness. Rupert’s explosive arrival at Searston causes outrage, so the fights are as furious off the field as on – particularly when glamorous WAGS flood in to stir up trouble and lust after Rupert… Rupert dislikes football and his first impressions of Searston are distinctly unfavourable. But as their new and indelibly competitive Chairman, he won’t stand for anything less than an Everest climb to the top of the Premier League. The equine narrative architecture of Rutshire is fascinating. The horses act as repositories for all the deep human emotions, especially for the shy or overlooked characters, who can only be themselves around a horse, and also for the stiff-upper-lipped, who can only truly adore a horse.There's still something infectiously joyful and funny about [Cooper's] particular brand of very English writing The Observer With the help of the club’s ravishing and adorable secretary, Tember West, and his sassy Press Officer, Dora Belvedon, he becomes increasingly fond of his riotous mix of players, despite bawling them out whenever they face defeat. It’s funny, with all this wish fulfilment (these chronicles get more and more like fairytales as they go along), to get a cold-hairdryer of medical reality. But you know how, in literary novels, no one ever has a job? It’s the same with cancer; they either get it and die or they get it and – plot twist – don’t die. None of them mention sitting on a plastic chair with a chemo drip, then their wee being mauve and their poo being like gravel. This is a useful corrective to the prevailing thinking on cancer – “stay positive”. Even if you don’t die, it’s still absolutely awful. Give entrepreneurialism a shot – it’s much easier than it looks