What's wrong with being a toff?

Toff-bashing is a perfectly natural blood sport. What is striking, however, is that even blatant sexism seems to be permitted when The Guardian is in hot pursuit.

Toff-bashing is a perfectly natural blood sport. What is striking, however, is that even blatant sexism seems to be permitted when The Guardian is in hot pursuit.

The Guardian's Saturday Review published a profile of my wife, Artemis Cooper, in its "A Life In Writing" series under the headline: "Knowing all the right people". The accompanying cartoon showed her hugging a huge address book. A gormless smile made her look alarmingly like the Duchess of York. Clearly, you cannot complain about a cartoon. Flattery is never the object. It is the caricature in John Cunningham's text which is interesting.

"A biographer could hardly get luckier," he begins. He then goes on to imply that every book that Artemis Cooper has written was due to a network of contacts created by a privileged upbringing. Most ludicrously of all, it appears that she was commissioned to write the official biography of Elizabeth David because she happened to have spoken to her on the telephone 10 years before. Cunningham does not say that it was part of her research for Cairo in the War, which happened to cover a key part of Elizabeth David's early life.

Cunningham makes it sound as if it were somehow reprehensible to make use of contacts, yet all the writers and journalists that I know, including those on The Guardian, depend on their contacts for research. Nor is any mention made of the rather relevant point that Artemis's books received excellent reviews and that Cairo in the War has just been republished in a new, third edition. Publishers, who are not exactly Debrett groupies, have to have good reasons for ringing her up to see "if she'd like to do a book about X or Y". But none of this stops Cunningham from ascribing her whole career purely to "good fortune". Rather significantly, he does not mention Watching In the Dark - her book about how doctors and nurses saved the life of our daughter. That was translated into 11 foreign languages, but Cunningham showed no interest in it, presumably because it could not fit into the caricature he was planning.

The most flagrant example of sexism, however, comes with the paragraph which begins: "In difficult circumstances even, good luck comes to her rescue: Cooper was contracted to do a book about Paris after the Liberation. It had to be in the shops for the 50th anniversary - but she was way behind with her research. Happily, she was able to persuade a first-class historian to pitch in as co-author: Anthony Beevor, her husband." Cunningham knew - he was told in the interview - that the real reason why she was "behind with her research" was the fact that she was expecting our second child, who was born 15 months before the book was published. I cannot think of any writer who would not fall behind with their research under such circumstances. So does that mean maternity leave is all right for everyone except for well-connected toffs? And since the quality of the finished works under discussion is never even addressed, does that mean that women toffs should not be considered serious writers? Cunningham is very flattering about me, but I would never have been able to research Stalingrad if I had not made use of a network of friends and contacts. I wonder what Cunningham would have written about us if our roles had been reversed.

It was obvious to Artemis from the moment the interview began that Cunningham had all but written the article already. The only bit of her books he seemed to have read were the acknowledgements pages in his search for evidence of "connections". The usual questions about research or writing were notably thin on the ground. She had no choice but to be as good-humoured as possible in the circumstances.

This quite shameless manipulation of facts, to say nothing of the sexism involved, was worthy of the tabloid press. In article after article, The Guardian at the moment is desperately trying to paint a picture of a country still obsessed with class, but the obsession seems to be concentrated far more on Farringdon Road than anywhere else. It is a big mistake. Journalists on high horses soon look ridiculous and hypocritical at the same time.

The writer is the author of 'Stalingrad' published by Penguin