A mournful air hangs over the New Statesman this week. Rachel Cooke, our brilliant – and hilarious – TV critic for almost 20 years, died on Friday 14 November, leaving a hole in this magazine that will be impossible to fill. What can I say at such a moment? Too few words seem appropriate; too many clichés flow too easily to do her legacy justice. And so, perhaps, it is best to leave it to her own words.
Looking back through my inbox, I came across an email she sent to me in July. I had only just started as editor and I had written to her wishing her well and reassuring her that the TV column would be there waiting for her whenever she felt well enough to return. Her reply was warm and lovely and hopeful. We would soon meet, she said, insistently, though we never did. “And I hope to be back making jokes for you and New Statesman readers as soon as I beat this awful thing.” How we wish that were so.
There is something particularly sad about returning to the messages of those no longer with us. It is not just what they wrote that catches you off guard, but the way they wrote it: the jokes and quirks of intonation that were particular to them; the exclamation marks or even the emojis they preferred. Suddenly, as soon as you open their message, you find yourself transported back to that happy moment when you were chatting with them, unaware of the bad thing coming. It is as if, suddenly, you are presented with the tragic drama of life.
Even today, I find myself stumbling over the last WhatsApps sent to me by two of the best bosses I ever worked with – Steve White at the Daily Mirror, and Stephen Brown at Politico. Whenever I begin to type in “Ste…” their last messages pop up. But what are we all to do with such messages, which collect and build as we get older? I have never been able to bring myself to delete them and so they just sit there on my phone, digital flotsam from the wreckage of our lifetimes. The last thing Steve White sent to me was a laughing-face emoji having politely told me to sod off. It still makes me smile. I doubt I will ever delete it.
In Rachel’s last message to me she wished me good luck in the job and left me with a few words of encouragement. “Make mischief. Enjoy every day. Life is precious,” she wrote. What wonderful advice; what a manifesto to live by! Indeed, all those at the New Statesman who knew her well tell me this is how she lived her own life, full of fun and laughter and kindness: dinner parties lasting long into the night, jokes and gossip shared in as much quantity as the wine.
As Anna Leszkiewicz writes in her touching tribute, Rachel was just as raucous and fun in her columns too, as shown in the overwhelming response we have had from readers to the news of her passing this week.
I am sure there are many other qualities I could mention about Rachel, but one that has jumped out among those I spoke to this week was her feminism. “She was a woman’s woman,” as Pippa Bailey, our executive editor for print, put it to me. She looked out for her female friends and colleagues, sending discreet notes of encouragement and support to those she felt needed a boost.
I hope she would be proud that today the New Statesman has a female print editor, features editor, creative editor, online editor and political editor to name just a few.
As her friend Juliet Rosenfeld wrote for the New Statesman this week, Rachel felt her feminism intensely. At Oxford, she helped push through a sexual harassment code, free rape alarms were issued and a campaign was launched to get rid of VAT on tampons. “Rachel was on fire. We wore matching dungarees and went on Reclaim the Night marches. We laughed about the dungarees, but Rachel’s stridency was everything. Rachel marched then and, really, continued to march all her life.”
Juliet kept all of Rachel’s letters and cards. A note from 1995 mentions a boyfriend and a looming deadline. But also this: “I mustn’t complain, life is good.” It was better with her here.
[Further reading: Meet the bond market vigilantes]
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This article appears in the 20 Nov 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Meet the bond vigilantes
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