Best of British: breakfast with Lily Allen

Matthew d’Ancona talks to the quintessentially English pop star about growing up, her longing to have children, celebrity culture, US politics and her new album

I am sitting opposite a demure young Englishwoman, sipping on jasmine tea, who would like nothing more, she says, than to settle down and have children. Young people and their parties interest her less and less. She likes the company of older friends now, and more sophisticated conversation. She shows me her elegant new Smythson notepaper, and discusses US politics, academic life and her plan to take her mother to Jamaica for Christmas. In person, she looks more like a Jane Austen heroine than a party queen. Meet Lily Allen.

It is hard to reconcile the woman in the flesh with her tabloid image as the definitive post-adolescent hedonist, the pop star who supposedly ‘falls out of nightclubs’ (as the red-top newspapers like to put it) and feeds the paparazzi with images of crazy nightlife. There is Lily the cartoon character, the pop princess. And then there is this highly intelligent woman tucking into an English breakfast at the Club at the Ivy (‘I am having sushi at lunch, so I can’), peering over her glasses to make a point, laughing a lot, putting a napkin over her face in embarrassment when I compliment her on her new album, full of irony at her own expense.

What happened? Quite simple: the beast that helped to create her bit back — and hard. ‘I do feel really passionate about celebrity culture, because I hate it, I really despise it — even though I’m such a part of it. Just because I think it’s so vacuous and awful. There is just nothing good comes out of it except materialism and it’s horrible. It’s now become like the politics of our age, that’s what young people are now interested in.