The Sunday Times Magazine • 15More than a decade ago, Jackson, a former
detective chief superintendent, wrote a book
detailing his career with Strathclyde Police,
Chasing Killers, in which he disclosed that
he had followed his daughter’s career.
Although she would be curious to meet
Jackson again, “what trumps my interest is
my sense of my connection to the people
who’ve been there for me”.
She was 29 and working at Channel 5
when she met her husband, Jones, who
was busy building the Soho House empire.
She and her sister went to stay at one of
the group’s hotels, Babington House, in
Somerset, after it opened and he carried her
bags to her room. “I wondered how a guy
with a posh accent like that ended up as a
porter in a hotel. He seemed inordinately
proud of the room. I thought, ‘OK, all right.
That’s the coffee-maker there. Off you trot.’ ”
Later Jones sat down at the communal table
where they were having lunch. “He was
interjecting in our conversation and I did
think, ‘Yeah, all right mate’, but then I
thought, ‘Well, you’re quite funny’.”
Afterwards he took them around the
grounds, by which point she assumed he
was the assistant manager. Later, after a few
glasses of rosé, she admitted to her sister
that he might be the one. “I was walking
back to my room ...” She pauses, looks
uncomfortable, then barrels on. “It will
maybe make you puke, but I said to my
sister, ‘Oh, that’s him, isn’t it? That’s the
guy I thought didn’t exist.’ ”
Laura had “always universally disliked
my boyfriends” — Young’s exes include
the former rugby player Kenny Logan, the
Rab C Nesbitt creator Ian Pattison and
the broadcaster Dominik Diamond —
“but she said, ‘I think maybe it is.’ I fell in
love with him quickly. He’s got great blue
eyes. I felt a sense of deep attraction and
connection. It was just, like, ‘I want to be
around you.’ That’s ridiculous, isn’t it?”
she says, growing self-conscious.
Jones had recently separated from his
first wife and after they married in 1999
Young became stepmother to his daughter,
then six, and son, who was four. Given her
bond with her own stepfather, she thought
step-parenting would be a breeze.“They sayexpectation is the enemy of contentment,”
she says. “Being a step-parent is an intimate
and difficult thing to get right. You can’t
immediately secure those bonds. They have
a life, they have their parents and you have
to tread lightly and carefully.”
She once said if she were ever to write a
book, it would be on step-parenting. “Oh
God, did I? Well, I don’t feel like an expert,”
she says before adding: “It’s probably the
best thing I’ve ever done. Our daughter,
Natasha, married last June. I think it was
the happiest day of my life. To see all four
kids together as a unit, I felt, well, that
seems like it’s worked out OK.”
Young says becoming a mother
“sharpened my ambition” and she became
“more focused about the kind of work I
wanted to do”. As a teenager she briefly
suffered from bulimia and she consciously
altered her attitude towards food for the
sake of her daughters. “Bulimia and eating
disorders can be kicked off by all sorts of
circumstances, but for me it was that feeling
of judgment of myself and the way I looked.
I decided from the moment I was weaningFreya that I wanted everything around food
to be very relaxed. I would never talk about
any of my insecurities in front of them. And
I would never label foods. When, however
fleeting, you’ve had an instance of that in
your life, it makes you hyper-aware of just
being careful around stuff like that.”
Rather aptly for a woman who interviewed
castaways for a living, she and Jones have
now bought their own island. They acquired
the 103-acre Inchconnachan island on Loch
Lomond earlier this year for £1.6 million.
Last year Soho House reportedly filed
secretly for an initial public offering on
the New York stock exchange, a flotation
that is expected to be valued at more than
$3 billion (£2.1 billion). That would earn
Jones nearly £300 million for his almost 10
per cent stake. The island is, quite literally,
a drop in the ocean. Other than a colony
of wallabies (brought over in the 1950s by
the Countess of Arran), it is uninhabited.
As a child Young spent time on the banks
of Loch Lomond. “Nick had said, ‘It’s
important for you to have somewhere in
Scotland.’ I’m so embedded [in England],
I’ve lived here as long as I lived in Scotland.
I delight in it but I am a foreigner.”
They plan to build a holiday retreat on the
island and so, as our conversation comes to
an end, it seems fitting to ask her the final
questions she used to ask her castaways.
You’ve got the King James Bible and the
complete works of Shakespeare. What
other book would you take to the island?
“I’d probably be a boring so-and-so and say
War and Peace, which I haven’t read.” And
your luxury item? “Dustin Hoffman took
the bar at the Ritz. I let him take it. I don’t
know if Lauren would let me take this ...”
She hesitates a moment, then adds, “A fully
functioning bathroom from the Ritz.
I would hate to feel crusty and dirty. I’m
going to say that Lauren would allow it,
because I allowed Dustin to take the bar.” n“Nick said,
‘it’s importaNt
for you
to have
somewhere iN
lZ"λϞϭϜκκ
they bought
aN islaNd
Young married Soho House founder Nick Jones in 1999; the couple
with three of their four children; from left, Natasha, Iona and FreyaInchconnachan island on Loch
Lomond, which Young and her
SWNS, GETTY IMAGES, SAVILLShusband bought for £1.6 million