Sex and the shires: Plum Sykes reveals all

‘I looked at a picture of him today and thought: “Why are you wearing those expensive clothes, you twit?”’ Plum Sykes is in the Claridge’s ArtSpace Café, eating the avocado on toast and talking about Rishi Sunak. ‘He looks like he’s wearing handmade shoes, which is a real no-no – a real no-no! But he can’t stop himself.’

David Cameron would never be so gauche, says Plum. ‘In fact, I remember asking David about that and he said he’d never wear a custom-made suit on the campaign trail because it sends the wrong message.’ Plum quite likes Sunak ‘because he’s clever and sensible’. But she thought Cameron was ‘brilliant – Lord Cameron of Chipping Norton now, isn’t that the funniest thing?’

Plum insists she’s ‘not political at all’. As an aristocratic ‘it girl’ who became a contributing editor to World of Interiors and American Vogue, however, she knows a lot about expensive fashion, rich people and Chipping Norton. Her new novel, Wives Like Us, is an amusing flight of fancy about all three.

It’s set in The Bottoms, a fictional part of the Cotswolds clearly based on the hyper-privileged world of the Camerons, the Jeremy Clarksons, the Bamford estate, the Beckhams and the super-duper rich Americans who’ll pay anything for a slice of idyllic English chic.

Plum wrote the final draft during Covid, when she was ‘reading a lot of P.G. Wodehouse to cheer myself up’. It’s clear that Jeeves and Wooster inspired her – although her Jeeves is an openly gay ‘executive butler’ called Ian Palmer and her Bertie is Tata Hawkins, a cheated-on ‘country princess’.

Today’s uber-rich really do have ‘executive butlers’, Plum explains. It is a ‘very Americanised or you could call it Europeanised version’ of the old-fashioned gentleman’s gentleman.