Tackle!: Let the sabotage and scandals begin in the new instant Sunday Times bestseller

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Sunak described your books as a guilty pleasure. Do you agree with the concept of guilty pleasures? Rupert dislikes football and his first impressions of Searston are distinctly unfavourable. But as their new and indelibly competitive Chairman, he won’t stand for anything less than an Everest climb to the top of the Premier League. Rupert’s explosive arrival at Searston causes outrage, so the fights are as furious off the field as on – particularly when glamorous WAGS flood in to stir up trouble and lust after Rupert… Nor do the rival local football team, their duplicitous chairman and their corrupt dealings make things easier – let the scandals, sabotage and seductions begin…

The novel features a gay relationship between a player and manager. How do you feel about homosexuality still being taboo in football? If the pressure is on for her books to be full of filth, it may be because she is the last bastion of the genre as we know it. Collins died in 2015, Krantz in 2019, and Conran hasn't published a novel since the 1990s. Cooper has said she has an idea for one more book after this, set in Sparta, the only place in ancient Greece where adultery was allowed. But will her last novel signal the death of the bonkbuster?The upcoming Disney+ adaptation of Rivals – starring Aidan Turner, David Tennant, Alex Hassell, Danny Dyer and Katherine Parkinson – might also pull in a whole new generation of Jilly Cooper fans. There is apparently so much sex on the show, on which Jilly is an executive producer, that Disney+ hired two intimacy coordinators for the set. This positive attitude to sex was a huge influence when Buchanan started writing her own novels. "My first novel, Insatiable, wouldn't exist if it wasn't for Jilly Cooper's novels," she says. "Jilly's books formed my emotional sex education, and Insatiable… owes an enormous debt to Rivals and Riders. I wanted to write escapist sex with real emotions."

Not much. Disney want me to keep my trap shut. But I’ve seen the first episodes and it’s wonderful. Young people are not only having less sex than their parents' generation did at their age, but are apparently less entertained by it in popular culture too. A recent study by the Center for Scholars and Storytellers (CSS) at UCLA said found that half of Gen Z would prefer to see less sex on screen and more platonic relationships. Movies already have fewer sex scenes. What readers might notice slightly less of though, is the actual sex. It's still in there, but somewhat tamer than her earlier books (even though she says her publishers pushed her to include more). Cooper has said she finds it "quite difficult" to write sex scenes now. Cooper with the stars of the Disney adaption of her novel Rivals, from left: Alex Hassell, Danny Dyer, David Tennant, Aidan Turner. Photograph: Disney+ The series is being written by Dominic Treadwell-Collins, who was an executive producer on A Very English Scandal and EastEnders, and Olivier award winner Laura Wade, and who wrote the screenplay for the film The Riot Club.

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Horses also hold a lot of the dynastic energy, as each prized thoroughbred sires another who looks just like him and wins stuff. Yet, in the end, they are dispensable; they can be bitten to death by other horses (Love Rat in Mount!) without disrupting the fundamentally romantic atmosphere. So, they are almost like a dialectical echo, the melodrama against the drama, the depth against the lightness. But while there is much to celebrate in Cooper's portrayals of sex, it wasn't always fun – or consensual. "There are rapes that happen in Jilly's books, and it is very rare that the rapist has any kind of comeuppance," says Burge. In one particularly disturbing scene in Riders, Rupert coerces his wife Helen into a sexual act. "It's a really horrible scene," says Burge. "Those aspects are difficult to read now." It’s funny, with all this wish fulfilment (these chronicles get more and more like fairytales as they go along), to get a cold-hairdryer of medical reality. But you know how, in literary novels, no one ever has a job? It’s the same with cancer; they either get it and die or they get it and – plot twist – don’t die. None of them mention sitting on a plastic chair with a chemo drip, then their wee being mauve and their poo being like gravel. This is a useful corrective to the prevailing thinking on cancer – “stay positive”. Even if you don’t die, it’s still absolutely awful. Give entrepreneurialism a shot – it’s much easier than it looks It should come as no surprise, then, that Delectable, who is a horse, being the only filly in an otherwise male race and also very pretty, for a horse, is the subject of a lot of male horse attention. A lot of the male men talk as though they fancy her as well. But it’s fine, because it just makes her run faster. Chemotherapy is a nightmare Of course. Although mainly about dogs nowadays. I’m very romantic about animals. I feed the birds twice a day. Doves come down at midday to be fed.

I spoke to my lovely former neighbour Tony Adams a lot and also players at my local club, Forest Green Rovers. Then a new manager arrived and got rid of all my friends. It’s such a ruthless sport but that makes for good fiction. I get lovely letters from teenagers saying they read Riders underneath the bed covers With the help of the club’s ravishing and adorable secretary, Tember West, and his sassy Press Officer, Dora Belvedon, he becomes increasingly fond of his riotous mix of players, despite bawling them out whenever they face defeat. The equine narrative architecture of Rutshire is fascinating. The horses act as repositories for all the deep human emotions, especially for the shy or overlooked characters, who can only be themselves around a horse, and also for the stiff-upper-lipped, who can only truly adore a horse. Treadwell-Collins said Cooper’s “iconic novels’ razor-sharp observations on class, sex, love and what it means to be British resonate even more today than when Jilly wrote them in the 1980s”.

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Its release is eagerly awaited by her legions of devoted fans. For an author whose books are filled with snobbery, Cooper attracts surprisingly little. She's read by both men and women, adored by fellow writers including Ian Rankin, Helen Fielding and Marian Keyes and loved by Cambridge academics. When Sunak came out as a fan of Cooper's books earlier this year, he explained that "you need to have escapism in your life". Along with her new book, a big-budget adaptation of Rivals is coming soon to Disney+. I used to say that the literary world is divided into two sets: people like me who long for a kind word in the Guardian and people in the Guardian who long for my sales. Isn’t that awful? Gosh no! For a start, I live in rural Gloucestershire, so I don’t meet my noisy mates any more. People who every time they open their mouth, you want to write down what they say. Really, though? Could one man invent these things, bring them to market and get rich enough to buy a football team? I have always doubted Cooper’s understanding of the business sphere. I had my doubts during Rivals about whether success was as easy as walking into a fundraising bid with three buttons of your shirt undone, rather than two. But, at the end of the day, she is rich and I am not. Class is complicated It sounds puritanical. Why feel guilty about pleasure? But I get lovely letters from teenagers saying they read Riders underneath the bed covers. It’s wonderful to give people guilty pleasures in that way.