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How I sexed-up the world's most genteel magazine - by Boris's sister (Warning: She's just as hilariously bonkers as he is)

By Rachel Johnson for The Mail on Sunday
Updated: 08:30 EST, 20 September 2010



With a roaring sound, Mrs Julia Budworth, encased in a navy twinset, came storming into my office at The Lady magazine. ‘You wretched girl, I’m going to MURDER you,’ she said in a loud voice.

As she stood foursquare in the middle of the room, she was almost shaking. ‘What were you thinking of? Why aren’t you jumping out of the window at the sight of me?’ she bellowed. Siblings: Boris Johnson and his editor sister Rachel

Not only is Mrs B on the board, but she’s also the mother of the other four directors — including my boss, Ben Budworth.

But if Mrs B was — shall we say — having ­second thoughts about my suitability — and enthusiasm — for the job, at this point so was I.




In my wildest dreams, I’d never anticipated becoming editor of a journal that was, back in 2009, largely devoted to articles about ­seasonal flowers and small furry mammals.

Let alone bringing the wrath of the proprietor down on my head by ­letting slip on national TV that it was ‘a piddling little magazine that nobody cares about or reads’.

I had, however, done both of these things and now it was time to face the fall-out. I rose politely and asked, ‘Why don’t you sack me, then?’

But to explain how I got to this point, it’s probably best if I start at the beginning . . .

June 9, 2009

Ben Budworth, publisher of The Lady, emails to say he’s looking for an editor and wants a chat. Hmm.

Is this a wind-up? I haven’t — cough — edited a magazine since 1986, when I was at university. Plus all I know about The Lady is what all middle-class mothers know: it’s where you find a nanny. Or used to, before the internet took over the world.

I’ve never read it. I’ve never knowingly seen it on a shelf, nor heard anyone mention it for a decade and a half. (My three children haven’t had so much as an au pair for five years.) In fact, I thought The Lady was extinct.


Ben Budworth calls and we make a date to have tea. ‘Great. We’ll get everything squared away then,’ he says. ‘Goodbye, sausage.’ ‘Goodbye,’ I say. I’m in slight shock. Did a man just call me ‘sausage’?

I put his name into Google: helicopter pilot, 45, who’s also run radio stations. I click on a picture and a man with buzz-cut hair and sharp little blue eyes clarifies on my screen.

He looks slightly vole-like, like a woodland creature from The Wind In The Willows.

June 12, 2009

Arrive at an imposing six-storey Georgian building in Bedford Street, Covent Garden. It has a smart livery of pinkish-cream and gold with the words ‘Rebuilt in 1861’ picked out in gold paint — as if a Merchant Ivory film set has been plonked down amid the coffee shops and burger bars. At work: Rachel on the job in The Lady's colourful offices

The man with the buzz-cut holds open the door — and I step 60 years back in time.

‘Like the paintwork,’ I say, ­running my hand over a panel in chipped cream and pale green. ‘When did you last have it done?’

‘Very recently,’ Ben Budworth replies. ‘In time for the Coronation, in 1953.’

The editor of The Lady, I ­discover, has her own private lavatory, tiled in avocado with a peach WC, and every day receives two freshly laundered tea-towels. The whole place seems completely bonkers. A time capsule from a safer but shabbier age.

Yes, The Lady has ‘lost its way’ admits Ben. But its old editor, Arline Usden, has finally gone and he needs a new one in September, to double circulation and restore to the title the lustre it once had.

So, no pressure then. I’m to come in on Saturday to ‘Meet The Budworths’ (his mother and three brothers).

June 30, 2009

Have just bought and read the mag for the first time. It bears absolutely no relationship, so far as I can tell, to the modern universe.

So I write out a ‘manifesto’, which is basically a list of me dropping every name I can think of and offering them up as potential contributors.

I don’t, in all honesty, see how Ben can resist.

July 2, 2009

Go to Spectator party, where everyone asks me without fail, ‘Is Boris here/coming?’ while looking past me, as if my brother [the Mayor of London] and I are joined at the hip and communicate telepathically.

'She doesn’t mince words — a sure sign that, sooner or later (as P.G. Wodehouse would say), out will pop the cloven hoof'

Then bump into Rowan Pelling, former editor of The Erotic Review, who tells me she’s been ‘basically offered’ the editorship of The Lady — though more than a dozen others are up for the job, too.

We rapidly establish that we’re both going to the ­Budworth beauty contest. I’d assumed it would be my coronation — hah! Feel crushed.

July 4, 2009

I settle into a chair at the head of the boardroom table, around which sit Mrs Julia Budworth (handsome, grandmotherly), and her sons. The interview goes like a train — but then I always think that.

I particularly warm to Mrs B, who has the spirit of the Blitz and a definite touch of the Aunt Agathas. She doesn’t mince words — a sure sign that, sooner or later (as P.G. Wodehouse would say), out will pop the cloven hoof.

July 19, 2009

My triumph — I’ve been appointed the ninth editor of The Lady magazine — is announced in the Mail on Sunday with a photograph of me looking like the lost lovechild of Myra Hindley and Björn Borg.

The die is cast. In September, I’ll take up an office job for the first time in 14 years — one I’ve never done before. And that’s not even the catch!

No, the catch is there’s a plan to make a fly-on-the-wall ­reality documentary for Channel 4 as I do it. So here’s the deal. I don’t just get to kill off the first women’s weekly mag in the world. I get to do it all on national TV!

September 1, 2009

Feeling of dread as the ­realisation dawns that it’s my first day as editor. Average age of reader: 78. Circulation: around 28,000. My new job: to lower the age of the reader to 45 and double the circulation.

My chances of succeeding: vanishingly small. As threatened, the TV crew arrive at 8am. When they ask me to leaf through a recent issue of the magazine, I find a whole article about cucumbers. I remark that the cover — actually a gorgeous photo of pink blowsy blooms — makes me think ‘someone has died’. Past and present: How The Lady used to look like in the 1920s, left, and Rachel's up-to-date version

In my new office, there’s a card from the literary editor, Paul (‘Blez’) ­Blezard, welcoming me aboard. And during the next two hours, I meet all the staff — including white-faced Janina Pogorzelski, 37, the treasured youngest daughter of the former ­editor, Arline Usden, and now my features editor.

Janina, who avoids eye ­contact, has been here her entire working life. Maybe she’s freaked about by the fact that she’s now working for a boss who hasn’t given birth to her.

I have a one-on-one with Lindsay Fulcher, the assistant editor, who says the problem with The Lady is that it’s done and dusted two weeks before publication. This is very inconvenient.

She’d ­prefer the issues to be finished eight weeks before. I stare at her dumbly. Surely the point of a weekly is that you can change things the week before?

At least her remark explains why The Lady looks as if it’s been ­produced at any random point in time in the last century (this week’s edition has features on garden gnomes and woodland walks).

In desperation, I commission a piece about the dos and don’ts of bedding the nanny.

September 2, 2009

Time to make a Gettysburg Address to the troops. ‘Our readers are modern and connected,’ I boom. ‘Old folks now are more Mick Jagger than Miss Marple,’ and so on. The staff all stare at me as if I’ve arrived from another planet.

Later, I check what’s due to run in my first issue. Ah: three articles about dormice, ramblers and the magical properties of vinegar.

What am I going to put on the cover? I have a brainwave. My father’s just written a piece for The Spectator about his gall-bladder op, but they don’t have room for it. It’s bound to be better than tips about vinegar. He whizzes it over.

September 8, 2009

Blez claims he can get The Lady half an hour with Michelle when the Obamas are in town — as if! Ben and I fall about laughing. So Blez has a hissy fit in front of whole office. ‘I work my n**s off for this magazine,’ he shouts.

September 15, 2009

Realise that the cover of my first issue, with Dada’s gall-bladder piece, is a picture of three nurses in blue scrubs running down a hospital corridor.

So, having complained loudly to all and sundry that The Lady looks like a Bupa catalogue, the first one I’ve had any input in producing looks like a Primary Care Trust annual report. Hope no one notices.

September 29, 2009

Big surprise. Blez — who went AWOL last week — came back, and has been whacked by Ben. I’ve been asking for this since I got here, but I had nothing to do with his dismissal in the end.

October 20, 2009

Have now told at least three ­people they can be agony aunt.

November 8, 2009

‘What is to be done if grandchildren arrive for lunch and persist in eating with their mouths open?’

Email from Lady Antonia Fraser [the historian and widow of playwright Harold Pinter].
She writes: ‘I just had an idea that you would like a crime slot, i.e., a weekly review of a crime novel . . . I thought it could be called THE LADY KILLER.’

I wonder whether the fact that she wants a column is not entirely unrelated to the fact that her newest, dewiest daughter-in-law, Clemmie Hambro, is now The Lady gardener.

I show the email to my mother and she comments: ‘That’s the first time to my knowledge that Antonia has ever asked for anything.’

November 11, 2009

Watch my son Oliver play rugby and have lovely time standing around in wellies and chatting up other Dragon School mummies at the post-match tea.

At various prep-school touchlines this term, I’ve so far signed up fellow Dragon mums Lady Helen Taylor and models Saffron Aldridge and India Hicks to be forthcoming cover girls — deals struck between cries of ‘Come on The Dragon!’ and ‘Well tackled, darling!’


Call Deborah, the Dowager Duchess of Devonshire, and invite myself up to Chatsworth, where I intend to go down on bended knee to ask her too if she will be our agony aunt.

Our readers adore her. I adore her. She asks for a sample question. I come up with: A grandmother writes in despair to ask: ‘What is to be done if grandchildren arrive for lunch and persist in eating with their mouths open?’

‘Oh,’ she cries, happily. ‘Beat them! You must beat them!’ She’s the one. I must get her, whatever it takes.

November 18, 2009

Am starting to dread the tide of dismay that fills my in-tray. The readers are writing to us in droves, about five to one against my changes in the magazine. Comic figure: Rachel's brother Boris looks tired as he listens to the Pope speak yesterday

They clearly think that by getting rid of the theatre review/short story/endless interviews with bearded actors, I’ve done the equivalent of dressing the Queen in hot-pants on Remembrance Sunday.

November 19, 2009
The sub-editors are checking a half-page with a picture of a blue teddy, with eyes made of glass buttons.

‘Reader Alert!’ shouts the ­accompanying text. ‘In July, The Lady ran a picture of this teddy in a feature on knitted toys. The Lady would like to warn ­readers that the teddy featured has dangerous buttons that small children could pull off and swallow. Please be very careful.’

Turns out Mrs B wants this run in four successive issues!

November 20, 2009

Go up to Chesterfield with TV crew formally to ask Debo, ­ Dowager Duchess of Devonshire, to be our agony aunt.

As I tuck myself into my first-class seat on the 9.55am from St Pancras, who should sit down a few rows ahead but Nick Clegg, leader of the Lib Dems. He kisses me hello.

The last time I saw him was in 1999, when we both went to a New Year’s Eve party at the British Embassy in Paris. Unfortunately (for Clegg), I then wrote up a garish account of this revel in which I implied that a guest by the name of ‘Nick’ had stayed out all night. Train chat: Rachel spent a pleasant journey with Nick Clegg despite previously causing him some issues in her writing

There was more than one Nick at the party, but Miriam González Durántez — Nick Clegg’s then fiancée — assumed I was referring to hers and almost called off their engagement. I had to crawl on my belly to apologise.

However, today, Nick and I chat the whole way to Chesterfield, and he’s so charming that I almost come across. To the Lib Dems, I mean.

Afterwards, I take a taxi to Chatsworth, where the Dowager Duchess seems very happy slumming it in an eight-bedroomed vicarage now that she’s moved out of the big house.

At a round table set for two, her butler Henry serves pheasant casserole, three veg, garlicky pommes dauphinoise, then blackcurrant crumble. Debo refuses to be filmed during lunch, when she talks, among other things, about Eton being full of Asians and Hong Kong Chinese.

Nor does she exactly sign up on the spot to be agony aunt, but I’m so enchanted I don’t press her. As I’m leaving, I gaze into her very blue eyes, sticky with macular degeneration, and hold her hands. ‘Can you see faces?’ I ask.

‘No, not at all,’ she tells me. ‘Yours looks like a sponge.’

November 25, 2009

Joan Collins, the super-glam seventy-something, has come to The Lady for tea (I invited her after a mutual friend said she was ­‘throbbing’ to write for us.)

She’s wearing a curious grey woollen beret that looks like a mushroom. She never removes it, but keeps patting the beret — and it rustles, as if it’s packed with tissue paper. And she keeps combing out her hair extensions/wig.

Having said all that, she looks fantastic, even alongside Percy, her husband-cum-business manager, aged 44. They’ve come straight from their accountant, in a very ill temper.

As soon as they see the C4 film crew, they get up to leave. ‘But I emailed Percy,’ I wail. He starts checking his BlackBerry and finds the email warning them about the filming. ‘Did I show you this?’ Percy asks Joan. She glances down. ‘Yes,’ she admits flatly.

We repair to the boardroom for tea and cake from Tesco, brought in by Ros, our dulcet-voiced telephonist. Joan lays about the walnut cake as if she hasn’t eaten for weeks.

‘This is absolutely delicious — where is it from?’ she asks. The crew is sent packing: ‘I will not be filmed eating!’ she says. Her make-up is at least an inch thick, and she keeps reapplying Clinique pancake and lipstick.

After she’s gone, Ros says: ‘I had to chip her make-up off the teacup before I could wash it.’

December 1, 2009

I call Mrs Budworth to say I’m not running the teddy bear alert again — ‘We can’t assume our readers are imbeciles who need to be told four times that small
children can choke on buttons.’

'All over the country, small children could be choking to death, and it would be All Our Fault!

‘Yes, they do!’ peals Mrs Budworth. ‘I will not rest until we run the warning again. What if someone didn’t buy a copy of The Lady that week? All over the country, small children could be choking to death, and it would be All Our Fault!’

I tell her the editor’s decision is final. ‘Not on The Lady, it’s not!’ she says in tones of decided crispness.

December 2, 2009

Mrs B calls. I’m worried we’re going to row about killer buttons again, but she only wants to talk about Debo. Mrs B and Debo are first cousins.

And it seems that the Dowager Duchess is worried because she doesn’t know what an agony aunt does. After I’ve weakly tried to explain, Mrs B suggests Debo files a country diary instead. ‘Lovely, Julia,’ I say (thinking, ‘not a bad idea’). ‘Will you call her or will I?’

‘I’m not going to call her,’ she sighs. ‘Whenever I do, the Prince of Wales is there for tea, and Henry, the butler, says: “Her Grace is with His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales. She says could she possibly call you back in five minutes?” It’s slightly lowering.’

December 3, 2009

The redesign of the cover is thrilling. The magazine is looking modern, and dare I say it, almost funky. To get Ben behind it, I say: ‘This’ll totally bring in the chicks.’

‘I was hoping that you were going to bring in the chicks anyway,’ he says. Which gives me pause. I know his mission was never merely to find an editor. It was to find himself a wife, too.

That’s why he has treated a ­succession of 21 women journalists to a fish lunch in the Forge restaurant — in what is now known as the ‘I have a bream’ series of dates.

Finding him a wife is clearly part of my job description. Any time I bring a girlfriend in, he insists on having her brought through to the boardroom so he can inspect her, and then he Googles her quickly when she’s gone.

December 7, 2009

Janina suggests Madonna for the cover. Ben explodes. ‘How could you have an old tart like Madge on the cover over Christmas? Our observant readers want the Blessed Madonna and Holy Infant!’

December 10, 2009

'I’m taking it upmarket — top writers are on board, it all looks lovely — but I’m still losing old readers faster than bringing new ones in.'

The film crew have heard that Joan Collins’s agent is asking for a £20,000 fee for her appearance in the documentary. Meanwhile, they’ve just interviewed my predecessor, Arline Usden, who moaned that I only got the job because I was ‘connected to someone famous’ and now I have a bigger budget than she did. Which isn’t entirely untrue.

December 14, 2009

Apparently, when Lady Helen Taylor was on the cover, her friends called her to titter: ‘I’m standing in the middle of Waitrose laughing at the fact that you’re on the cover of — hee hee — The LADY!’

January 5, 2010

A friend of my husband’s called Lady Henrietta Rous has told him the magazine is now too upmarket. ‘The only people who read The Lady are the lower orders,’ she said earnestly.

Aaaggh! What if she’s right? I’m taking it upmarket — top writers are on board, it all looks lovely — but I’m still losing old readers faster than bringing new ones in.
Would I read it? Well, I’d definitely flick through, as would most of my friends. But we wouldn’t, necessarily, buy it. Not yet, anyway.

January 18, 2010

See freshly-single (TV star) Trinny Woodall at a party and ask her to be a cover girl. She seems keen, and pretends to send me an email on her BlackBerry so I can have her email address. It never arrives. So, presumably, she’d rather kill herself than be on the cover of The Lady.

January 19, 2010

Email from reader. ‘Dear Madam, The reason I will not be renewing my subscription is the fact that you have chosen that simpering ­adultress [sic] Lady Antonia ­Fraser as your book reviewer.

‘She has never shown any remorse for the misery she caused [Harold Pinter’s first wife] Vivien Merchant and her son, and I can’t help ­thinking that she and the social-climbing, “poor man’s Samuel ­Beckett” writer Harold Pinter rather deserved each other.’ Ouch! I write back saying that we are none of us without sin and that I have no doubt that Antonia is aware of hers.

January 25, 2010

A letter on Basildon Bond from a woman who says she advertised herself as a carer in Kent in the ‘Sits. Wanted’ columns of The Lady.

‘I had nothing but perverts ringing me up. I can tell you it was extremely disturbing and upsetting. I did not expect this at all because of the prestigious nature of your publication.’

I’m most surprised. So, perverts read the mag. Lady Henrietta Rous — who told me only the lower orders did — has been proved ­deliciously wrong.

February 11, 2010

Mrs Budsworth manifests in Bedford Street. ‘You’re a very rude girl,’ she says in a wig-lifting voice. Apparently, I haven’t replied to a letter from her, but I never got it.

Back in my office, I talk on the phone to the Dowager Duchess of Devonshire. I tell her that her cousin has just made a papal visit.

‘And how was she?’ Debo asks, mischief in voice. I say that it would have been possible to distinguish Mrs B with a grievance quite easily from a ray of sunshine. ‘She’s rather sharply Right-wing,’ Debo says fondly. ‘It makes one rather good value, don’t you think?’

February 23, 2010

Race to the Burberry catwalk show, held in a marquee adjoining Tate Britain. Later, I have a nice chat with Sam Cam, who looks ­lustrously beautiful: all long-lashed eyes and sheeny hair.

When Mrs Cameron first turned up at St Mary Abbots C of E ­primary, with her four-year-old daughter Nancy in tow, someone pointed to her — a drooling daddy, no doubt — and drawled, ‘So . . . who does that gorgeous Iranian au pair belong to?’

February 27, 2010

The TV crew are doing a final ­interview with me to provide a final scene for the documentary. Apparently, Channel 4 think it’s too tame.

‘It’s got to be all blood-on-the-carpet,’ says the director dolefully. There may be trouble ahead . . .

A Diary of The Lady: My First Year As Editor by Rachel Johnson is published by Fig Tree at £16.99. To order a copy for £12.99 (inc. p&p) call 0845 155 0720.




