It seems Rishi Sunak is still embarking on his awkward journey of growth from being “out of touch” to fully integrating with the real world, as more of his apparent guilty pleasures have emerged. In his spare time, the sliders-wearing, McDonald’s-loving polished tech-bro apparently enjoys reading racy novels by the bestselling author Jilly Cooper. The prime minister ranks her book Riders as one of his all-time favourite novels, according to the Spectator. The 1985 novel was set in the world of showjumping, and centres on the personal and professional life of the devastatingly good-looking but dastardly Rupert Campbell-Black and his rival Jake Lovell. In Cooper’s words, the book was based on four “very, very grand, gorgeous men who I met and thought: ‘Gosh, I’ll put a bit of that in a book’”.
Its cover features a woman in jodhpurs holding a riding crop, with a man’s hand resting on her bottom. In 2015 it was controversially redesigned, moving the man’s hand a few inches up the rider’s bottom. One passage reads: “Fascinated, she watched his long fingers stroking her belly, then sliding into the dark bush.” Another excerpt reads: “Now he was lifting her right leg, holding back the inside of her thigh … it was like an express train going into a tunnel.” The prime minister’s deputy spokesperson said discussion of the novel “hadn’t come up” in any of their conversations. Sunak, who turned 43 on Friday and celebrated with a carrot cake from his team, and planned an evening dinner with his wife, is also said to enjoy watching the Netflix show Emily in Paris. According to the Spectator, his colleagues tease him for his taste in music; he is apparently a Michael Bublé fan. The PM has said he has a hip-hop playlist to help him get psyched up before speeches, while he has also admitted listening to the Global station Heart 00s on the way into work. In his first attempt to get into No 10 last summer, Sunak told ITV’s This Morning programme he enjoyed McDonald’s breakfast wraps – an item that had disappeared from the chain’s menu almost two and a half years before. A source from Sunak’s campaign said he had eaten the wraps with his children when they were on the menu: “I think given he’s barely seen his kids in the last two and a half years, it’s likely he hasn’t been to McDonald’s in that time.” Sunak has been mocked for his attempts to “fit in” with youth culture, such as when pictures of him preparing for the budget were released and he was seen wearing white socks and a pair of £95 sliders from the Italian streetwear brand Palm Angels.
But as the stylist Gary Armstrong noted at the time, the pictures were released in October 2021, when the real world of fashion had “already moved on slightly from straightforward sliders”. Cooper wrote in the Guardian that a night spent in a “Kama Sutra room” with her husband, after the peer Alexander Thynn invited them for a weekend away in the countryside, eventually led to her completing Riders. Reflecting on the novel’s success, Cooper recalled her parents’ reactions to its graphic sex scenes. She told the Guardian: “My mother would ring up and say: ‘Darling, I’m getting on very well with it. I’ve got to page 414. I do hope it’s only showjumpers who behave this badly.’”