The Times Magazine 43adds, “Although if my daughter heard me talk
about incarceration here, she’d kill me. But it
puts pressures on your relationship. Like nuns,
you’re in a small community with no release.
So values like civility, resourcefulness and
fortitude matter more. Also, like monks, you
are thinking about other people without being
able to see them.”
Monasticism, she argues, is the opposite
of modern “mindfulness”, which “is just
something that will make ‘me’ feel calmer
and better. The real Maria von Trapp said
she found modern times appalling because we
never shut up about ourselves. Mindfulness is
thinking about yourself even more. And that’s
what’s driving everyone crazy. Whereas I find
monasticism attractive because it is the
opposite of that self-obsession.”
At the Standard, Sands was at the heart
of the Establishment, socialising often with
the super-rich. Did she think their wealth
made them happy? “I remember going on
Concorde’s last flight. There were quite a lot
of journalists, but there were rich people too.
And it was the most wretched flight, which
ended up with Piers Morgan and Jeremy
Clarkson having a fight. Everyone was bad-
tempered, everyone had headaches.” Besides,
she says, “The rich are worried all the time
- about who’s after your money, and why
people want to be your friend. So I wouldn’t
want to be super-rich. I think.”
Not even Lebedev with his castle in Italy?
“He’s a fascinating mix,” she says carefully,
“because actually he is very, very interested in
religious artefacts, and I went around quite a
few churches with him. He’s Russian, so it’s a
sort of sense of melancholy and philosophy,
and actually a great appreciation of art. And
yet he’s also a proprietor, and they’re all quite
demanding. Are they not, Janice?”
Did she support his controversial elevation
to the Lords? “Why shouldn’t he be a peer?
He’s a British citizen. He’s kept a newspaper
going, which I always give enormous credit
to... I’ve known two proprietors made lords,
Conrad [Black] and Evgeny. But there’s a
question of how power is acquired, obviously.”
What did she make of George Osborne,
a non-journalist, becoming her successor
as editor? “He did say, when he joined the
Standard, that he had never run a newspaper
but he had run a country, which I think was
quite a line. George has a great sense of how
politics works, and that was important. There
are other people who can always put a page
together... hacks can do that.” Yet Osborne
being replaced with Emily Sheffield of Vogue,
who happens to be David Cameron’s sister-in-
law, presents the media as an incestuous elite.
“Well, that’s, um... in some ways, my daughter
would say, sort of, how the country works.”
I lose count of the times Sands invokes
her daughter – she and Fletcher also have a
son who lives in Hong Kong – as if she’s her
conscience squatting on her shoulder, rolling
her eyes at her mother’s liberal-Tory views.
“That’s what she is. I love her very much
as well, but she’s totally my conscience.” In
normal times, Tilly, 26, puts on comedy shows;
in lockdown, she teaches excluded pupils
online. “Very difficult children. She is a clever,
funny girl, just totally socially purposeful. So
what she finds maddening about me is my
terrible complacency.”
Many parents of twentysomethings will
be familiar with this generational divide. Tilly
refuses to come up to Norfolk, is appalled
her parents have a second home, buys all her
clothes in charity shops and “wants to make
the world better”. In her book, Sands describes
her as “an Outdoor Socialist. Hiking across
the country has become her alternative to
politics... She walks off her gloom and fears.”
Whereas Sands is very much a child
of the Eighties. “It was about having a good
time, and the Thatcher thing was all social
aspiration and levelling up and meritocracy.”
Sands says she will quote a newspaper story
to Tilly about a migrant who came to Britain
with nothing, worked hard and has just
got into Oxford, then her daughter will
counter with, “Look at this person who
is a refugee, got ill and became homeless and
the government failed them.” Sands reflects
that her generation too easily believes its
wealth was deserved, underplaying the role
of luck: “The fact that so much of life can go
either way.”
To what does she ascribe her own success?
“I think a bit of bloody-mindedness that
comes out of rejection,” she says. “Also being a
single mother makes you quite sort of gritty.”
She was born in Tunbridge Wells to a
solidly middle-class family. Her father worked
in the colonial service and later for the BBC
in Brussels; her brother, who also lives in
Norfolk, is the entertainer Kit Hesketh-
Harvey of Kit and the Widow. After boarding
school, Sands studied English at Goldsmiths.
“But I met my first husband shortly after
starting, so have no real memories of being
a student. We put on cabaret in a basement
in Swiss Cottage instead.”
But while her husband, Julian Sands,
went on to star in A Room With a View, Sarah
became a news reporter on the Sevenoaks
Chronicle. Then, shortly after their son, Henry,
was born, Julian ran off to Los Angeles, leavingher holding the baby, with John Malkovich,
Henry’s godfather, working as her nanny.
She needed a job, but could only succeed in
journalism by barely acknowledging she had
a child, even when he fell ill with pneumonia.
“I am so old,” she says, “I remember hot metal,
and bins on fire with cigarette smoke at 7am
and the tea trolley boy, which is how [the
former Spectator editor] Frank Johnson got
into newspapers. And being told you are a
useless c***,” she says, adding drily, “Those
were the days, weren’t they?”
In such a newspaper culture, Sands stood
out as calm, kind, very well liked. At the Toda y
programme she always sent “hero-grams”
to show her appreciation and organised a
summer party to include all staff, not just the
highly paid presenters. In the minus column is
her reputation (the reason for her brief tenure
at The Sunday Telegraph) as a lightweight, who
prefers froth over substance. Unlike previous
Toda y editors, she did not spend hours “war-
gaming” major political interviews.
“I just wanted to broaden Toda y, so it wasn’t
only Westminster politics,” she says. “Because
I thought there was life outside.” She was
criticised for a whole programme presented
live from London Fashion Week. But, she
counters, no one complains if the show
features cars or gadgets, or other typically
male pleasures: “So maybe that’s a Reithian
sort of puritanism at the heart of the BBC.”
Does she think it’s a good thing the
country is now run by journalists – Boris
Johnson and Michael Gove? “No, I don’t. How
can it be? We haven’t got the attention span.
We’re excitable. We want diversions.” Of
Johnson himself she says, “With Boris there’s
something else at work, which is that he just
has this destiny. You have this blond toddler
trashing a room, but somehow, out of that, it
all comes good. You never know with him.”
Would she accept a peerage herself? At this
she squirms and cries jokily for her in-house
PR man: “Kim! Help, it’s all going wrong!” She
may have left Toda y and even London, but she
is still the supreme schmoozer. When I ask
about George Osborne’s nine jobs, she says,
“I’m very much basing myself on his model.”
She’s chair of the conservative Bright Blue
think tank, a board director of consultancy
firm Hawthorn Advisors, plus is organising
what she hopes modestly will be the
“British Davos”, an annual science and tech
conference. “So I’m not feeling very sunsetty.”
So much for the monastic virtues of
humility, silence and poverty. At least, Sands
says, grandmotherhood has delivered her
patience. “Billy has given me pleasure beyond
anything I could have imagined,” she says.
“The bits that you thought quite boring when
you were a mother, just picking up a brick
he’s knocked over 1,000 times, now I could
do it all day.” nChic and charming,
she’d work the room like
Anna Wintour then fly
off to the next do