Why ‘shabby’ Rachel Johnson is ‘just right’ for The Lady

Rachel Johnson has told the Mail on Sunday how she bagged her job as the new editor of The Lady – one of the UK’s oldest women’s magazines.

She showed the publisher around her Notting Hill home and he said: “This is shabby. Just right. It’s not all modern or vulgar. You’ll fit right in with our magazine.”

The author and columnist has a tough job ahead of her. The Lady has a circulation of just 31,000 and with an average reader age of 70, the MoS notes that this is a ‘dying market’.

Johnson says she was approached by publisher Ben Budworth about taking the job on and was initially reluctant to do so, saying: ‘I wasn’t really looking for full-time employment’.

Novelist Daisy Waugh, former Erotic Review editor Rowan Pelling and author Molly Watson were the other candidates on the final shortlist apparently.

Revealing her plans for the title, Johnson says: “It still looks to me a little too much like a Bupa catalogue. We must get away from using generic cover pictures of women with neat grey bobs and white linen trousers. I’m going to put real women on the front…like Michelle Obama or Mariella Frostrup.”