King of the social scene Nicholas Coleridge on his new novel

The novelist, Condé Nast MD and social-scene setter tells Liz Hoggard indiscretions about the Beckhams and why he paid Rupert Everett £3 an hour
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5 October 2012

It’s the question preoccupying literary London. Who is the modern-day Becky Sharp who inspired Nicholas Coleridge’s new novel, The Adventuress: The Irresistible Rise of Miss Cath Fox?

Victoria Beckham? Rebekah Brooks? Of course, Coleridge, MD of Condé Nast, has the best address book in London. He’s had ample opportunity to observe the rise of many female socialites. But his gold-digging heroine Cath Fox is rather different. Working class, tattooed and wonderfully amoral, she sleeps her way to the top — marrying a Premiership footballer, a media baron, and finally a member of the royal family.

This is Coleridge’s 15th book — he writes at weekends when he’s not working at Vogue House. It can’t be for the money. But he agrees he jumps at the chance to play God with a cast of highly-strung characters. “You can never control anyone at work,” he admits cheerfully. “At least 650 of the 700 staff at Condé Nast have extremely strong views, so all you can do is forge the direction, and try to take the editors with you.”

Coleridge is a blue-blood. He went to Eton and Cambridge. Poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge was his five-times great-uncle. He lives in film director Joseph Losey’s old house just off Chelsea’s Walpole Street with his wife Georgia and their four children.

His enthusiasm is infectious. For a man who oversees a huge empire, he’s touchingly pleased that I like his heroine.

“I absolutely care about her, although her character can be despicable and wicked, but one is also caught up in her enormous rise through society. Her eyes are always glinting and swivelling for something better.”

His children read the book on a family boating holiday along the Turkish coast. When they got to the “frisky” massage parlour scenes (modelled on the indiscretions of Fergie’s father Major Ron Ferguson at the Wigmore Club), they chorused: “Oh Dad-eee.”

His latest offering is also rich on life as a London magazine publisher in the Eighties. Every so often you think: “There’s the young Rebekah Brooks or there’s Alex Shulman.”

Coleridge is droll about Brooks but worries about her husband Charlie. “I don’t know him very well but he crosses my life. He seems an incredibly nice Jilly Cooper-ish type of person. It somehow seems most unjust.”

His own career started when he became a trainee newspaper reporter in Cornwall. He later became associate editor of Tatler during Tina Brown’s explosive editorship and joined Condé Nast in 1989, becoming MD three years later.

In his day job he has to be the epitome of discretion. But the books allow him to hint at outrageous material.

He tells me a story about sitting next to Victoria Beckham’s parents at a dinner “so I learned more in two hours about what it’s like to be her because the whole Adams family are part of this tight-knit court to Victoria. Their entire life is in the thrall of it, but they’re also rather trapped by it.”

Apparently, when someone rings the intercom at the gates of Beckingham Palace, the conversation is broadcast throughout the house. At Saturday lunch, guests sit rigid as tabloid reporters roar personal questions down the phone.

“The reporter was saying: ‘Hello, Nobby Gosher, Sunday People, have you got any comments about the rumour that David has been seeing a massage girl?’ Mrs Adams told me how awful it was but when I suggested they turn it off, she said: ‘No, we can’t, because it might be a genuine guest coming.’ The thought of them sitting there Saturday after Saturday unable to …” He dissolves into giggles.

Of course, life chez Coleridge is hardly conventional. Rupert Everett was his cleaning lady when he first left university. “I had a Chelsea basement flat and paid Rupert £3 an hour for his services. But it was perfectly obvious he hadn’t done much because the telephone was on the bed, next to the shape of someone who’d clearly been lying there. Then he went off to better things.”

Lawyer Fiona Shackleton, who has represented various royals as well as Sir Paul McCartney, checks the divorce detail in his books — “If you want something done, ask a busy woman,” he says. The boss of Kurt Geiger shoes provided all the colour for the rough pubs Cath frequents in Eighties Portsmouth, and when Coleridge wrote his 2002 novel, Godchildren, Conrad Black and Barbara Amiel sent it to 40 of their richest friends for Christmas. “It was just before everything started to go wrong but I’ve always felt a debt of gratitude as these copies were mailed off to American billionaires.”

For all his charm, we know Coleridge is the chronicler of social climbing. Can he give me any tips?

“I think the world is quite an appearance-ist place and people who look well turned-out and keen and who smile, it’s usually easier for them than people who look tired and grungy,” he says. “Probably that’s very unfair but I think it’s the case. Luck doesn’t come to you, you have to seek it out. But the more you go out and put yourself in the path of opportunity and hope, the better.”

Though he will be looking carefully at your CV: “I always think if someone has only ever worked somewhere for 30 months, they always leave just before it becomes apparent whether they’ve been a success or a failure.”

For a powerful man, he has little time for machismo. “Fifty-five-year-old friends of mine who went into the City are working in these huge trading floors where it’s 400 men with two token women. I feel lucky that I work in such a civilised world with women.”

He tells me his 16-year-old daughter is obsessed by Caitlin Moran’s How to be a Woman. “Next week she and her whole dorm are going to see her at the Cheltenham Literary Festival. They’ve read all her books and are so excited.”

If Moran is ever to be made the next editor of Vogue, you read it here first.

The Adventuress: The Irresistible Rise of Miss Cath Fox is published by Orion Books next Thursday.

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