When there is the inevitable backlash Rachel’s automatic response to any jibe is self-caricature. She is always first in line to poke fun at that image of a posh, entitled socialite. Thus her reality television appearances: charting her editorship at society magazine The Lady and slumming it with the destitute in Famous, Rich and Hungry. Then there are the deliberately provocative articles, such as the Times feature in which Rachel visited cut-price supermarket Lidl (“This was like entering a morgue, only colder and deader somehow”). By jumping in and owning the media’s derogative image of her, Rachel displays that most attractive of qualities, the ability to laugh at herself.
The greatest satire, however, she saves for her Notting Hell series of novels documenting the lives of the super-rich in the affluent Notting Hill area of west London, where she lives with her husband Ivo Dawnay, London director of the National Trust; they have three children. That she writes for both her readers’ pleasure and her own is, of course, anathema to many “highbrow” writers. The playwright and novelist Hanif Kureishi refused to believe that he and Rachel shared the same agent. When pressed for his reasons, Kureishi eventually exploded: “He can’t be yours, he’s a literary agent.” She may have written five books and been a judge for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, but the literary community will not accept her into the fold. Rachel doesn’t give a hoot. She’d rather romp her way to winning the Bad Sex in Fiction award (as she did for Shire Hell in 2008) than strain ponderously for the Booker.
Like their author, the Notting Hell novels bring a wicked joy to people’s lives. What could be more worthy? And of course they earn Rachel the money she needs to keep up with the Johnsons. One might accuse her of hiring herself out to anyone who needs a controversial opinion on the topic of the day, whether it be discussing the election on the Andrew Marr show, or the appropriate skirt length for a forty-something woman in the Mail on Sunday. But then, in the words of another Johnson, “no man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.” And a blockhead Rachel Johnson most certainly is not.
