Kirstie Allsopp talks Britain’s education system, working hard and filling your house for free

Kirstie Allsopp shares her Notting Hill home in west London, a hotchpotch of different styles and influences, with a bevy of boys: her property-developer partner, Ben Andersen, their seven-year-old and five-year-old sons, Bay and Oscar, as well as her stepsons Hal and Orion by Ben’s ex-wife, Theresa.

All this “boysyness” is offset by Allsopp’s battalion of women helpers: a nanny, a house-keeper, a personal assistant, as well as her mother, sisters and lots of girlfriends nearby. As she says, when discussing whether or not she would like to have a daughter, if she has another child (she is 41): “There is nothing lacking in a girl sense in my life – and I’m certainly not looking to a child to produce that…”

The house is more 1960s functional than 1840s grand, like the vast stucco piles that line the wide street and sell for gazillions. It’s a comfortable, light, lived-in space, with large glass windows at the back looking out on communal gardens. There is an oversize Cadbury’s 99 ice-cream cone statue on their private terrace (Ben’s choice), a hallway of strangely elegiac and beautiful blown-up photos of a rave in formerly East Berlin just after the Wall came down (ditto Ben), and masses of more traditional paintings of horses in the living room (Ben again). There are piles of shells under the washbasin of the bathroom, a pastel Aga in the kitchen and a notice board covered with gymkhana rosettes.

Allsopp is a bit of a hotchpotch herself. She is a multicultural-embracing feminist and devoted Guardian-reading rebel with lots of causes. She is also a union-bashing, anti-comprehensive schools Tory. She is genuinely funny and delightful but would be easy to parody. Her expressions and the way she talks are so idiosyncratic – the husky, slight breathiness, the extreme enthusiasm – that if her true speech patterns were replicated here, it would be FULL of CAPITAL LETTERS and many exclamation marks!!!!!

In person, she is exactly how she is on her shows… really interested, sometimes a bit distracted, forthright, direct and with no side. Her shining sincerity is one of the reasons why she is so good on telly. When I ask her, for instance, whether she thinks that she is thick (after we have been discussing her disliking school; she went to ten different ones, including the liberal, co-ed Bedales), she laughs good-naturedly and says: “No, I don’t. But I didn’t like large groups of my contemporaries and I’m not particularly good with authority.”

She is, fortunately, quite bad at being bland, as well as being seemingly incapable of concealing her feelings. When I say that Ben might look like a slightly plumper Ben Fogle, possibly, she shrieks in horror: “No! No! No! And I like Ben Fogle… but NO! NO!!!!”

On the subject of more children – she would like another one, but is concerned about how she could fit it in – she says: “I love children and I love babies. I would have had… ten, if it would have been feasible. But it’s very hard to be a working mother and a good parent to numerous numbers of children.”

One of her younger sisters, Natasha, works for her. When I ask in what capacity, Allsopp says, “She basically helps Beth [her PA], but I have to be really careful saying that because you don’t want to say ‘My assistant has an assistant’ – it sounds completely Madonna!”

Her best line has to be when we were discussing an interview with her that she hadn’t much liked and I suggest it must have been because the writer implied that Ben was henpecked. “Did she refer to Ben as henpecked? That would be laughable,” she practically snorts. “He is the least henpecked man in Britain.”

Does he boss you around? “No, not too much,” she says. “If you’re quite strong-minded, which I am, it’s very important that you are in a very, very equal relationship and Ben is a very strong-minded, independent person who absolutely knows what he wants.”

We are sitting at the table in a capacious open-plan kitchen-dining space leading into a living room that’s dominated by a hefty sandstone fireplace that would notlook out of place in a castle. Allsopp gestures to it as a symbol of her and Ben’s relationship. “Ben took me to see it in a shop and I thought it was so ugly I burst into tears. Five days later, I went to him and said, ‘I tell you what, I’ll buy the fireplace for you as a present – we’ll put it into storage and when you get a building that you really want to put a fireplace in, put it in and then it won’t be lost to you.’

“Then I had my son and went to Devon while this place was being redone and I came back to find it here! It’s mad and it’s way too big – but I’m very fond of it now. So that fireplace sums us up. I might occasionally say I don’t want something, but I’ll rarely stick to it.”

She gives Ben the credit for inspiring her new series, Kirstie’s Fill Your House for Free – a four-programme pilot that she is obviously hoping will eventually run as long as Location, Location, Location. Allsopp will be meeting families whose homes need a makeover but who are short of cash. The idea is to use the “freecycling” idea but also to restore and upscale old furniture.

“This is the message we are trying to bang home,” she says. “We need to stop thinking that a shop is the place to get everything. We can’t go on buying – and the stuff we had before has to go somewhere.” But what if you want new stuff? “Responsibly get rid of your old stuff.”

Is she good at recycling her clothes? “I have a mother, two sisters, numerous people that I love and who work for me and also I wear the same clothes,” she says. She has three different dresses (her trademark wraparound frock, with a neat little cardigan, such as the one she is wearing today) and every year she buys a few new ones for television.

She doesn’t own a pair of jeans – “I do have decent ankles” – and didn’t even wear them as a teenager. In fact, she wore more or less the same ladylike clothes then as she does now, which rather singled her out. “I think lack of desire to conform is in itself an eccentricity, and the fact that I always wore skirts meant I was seen as eccentric.”

I ask her what ratio of her friends are on the left versus the right, and she says that since she has more and more friends who are journalists, it’s gone up from 70 per cent Labour to 85 per cent. “I do have a lot of journalist friends,” she says, “but I also have a lot of friends like me who are liberal about all the things that matter and economically conservative.”

Why didn’t she vote for New Labour, who embraced big business? “I didn’t vote for Blair because he didn’t convince me that he had changed the core of Labour. And as long as the unions control the party, then I could never vote Labour. I look at someone like my friend, Toby Young, and his free schools, and his battles with the teaching unions have been very informative.”

When I put the counter-argument – that the money that is going to the free schools could be better directed towards the state system and all its hardworking, underpaid teachers – Allsopp responds with passion, saying that as a dyslexic herself, with a dyslexic child, her belief is that the state system doesn’t work: “I feel passionately that the comprehensive ethos is wrong, and that you cannot educate all children together in the same environment in the same way because they are so varied.

“And every time you talk about grammar schools people say, ‘What about the people who failed to get into grammar schools?’ But what about the people who succeeded in getting into grammar schools? If someone starts on a housing estate in very deprived circumstances, their chance of getting to a better place is far less now than it was 50 years ago. One reason is the removal of the grammar schools, which has removed that ability for people to get on.”

Her father, Charles Henry Allsopp, is the 6th Baron Hindlip. Her father’s family were brewers: “In the 1900s, Allsopps Beer was the No 1 selling IPA,” she says, with a measure of pride, and she is Scottish on both sides of her family – her mother’s family ran the Glasgow buses and funeral companies, and her maternal great-grandfather was one of the founders of ICI.

The Allsopps brought up their four children in a village near Hungerford in Berkshire, and bought and sold property in London to supplement the comparatively modest salary from Christie’s, where her father worked. How was she brought up? “To work hard. Were my parents posh-poor? Absolutely not,” she continues. “It’s perfectly possible to have an enormously privileged upbringing, which I did, and still understand the value of the pound.”

A photo of her other younger sister, Sofie (who made news after she had a pre-emptive mastectomy around the same time as Angelina Jolie), made me wonder if there was any Indian blood in the family. “Oh, I wish!” she says. “My father always used to say, ‘I’m sure there’s something somewhere.’ Ben does and when I look at the extraordinary health and strength of my children I think, ‘Thank God! Being a tiny bit Indian, a tiny bit South African – Jewish on my mother-in-law’s side – Eastern European, Indian, Scottish… Being mongrel is really good.’”

She was brought up C of E but doesn’t know whether she believes in God. What she does think is, “what faiths teach you is the ways through which you lead your life. You can only be happy by making those you love happy. If you suddenly say, ‘Right, I’m going to seek my own happiness,’ you’re never going to find it.”

I ask Allsopp – who always describes herself as a feminist – what feminism means to her. “For me, it is knowing what FGM stands for [Female Genital Mutilation] and realising that it is important to campaign for things in the UK but there are things that go on in other parts of the world that are so much worse and perhaps navel-gazing is not helping women around the world.

“Understanding the work of Marie Stopes, for a start, campaigning for maternal health… Being pro-choice is one of the most important tenets of feminism for me. One of my problems with the NCT [National Childbirth Trust, with whom she has had well-documented fights] is the absolute obsession with The Mother and The Birth and my experience of mothers is that they just want to get a baby safely delivered into their hands.”

Are you with Martha Stewart or are you with Shirley “Superwoman” Conran? “Not Shirley Conran.” So for you, life is not too short to stuff a mushroom. “No, but I would stuff an almond into an apricot and wrap it in bacon because that’s a new thing someone told me to do and my stepson thought it was the best thing he’d ever eaten in his life.”

Allsopp had arrived late because she had taken the family puppy to her son’s classroom and the session had overrun. In a week or so, she is inviting 27 children for Bay’s birthday and tonight, she is hosting all the Year Two parents for the end of term party, serving Jamie Oliver’s slowcooked lamb, bowls of humous and yoghurt and preserved lemons.

If she’s lucky, she will have time before the party for one of her two luxuries – a bath rather than a shower (the other is having time to read The Guardian properly on Saturday).

In the flesh, Allsopp looks marvellous: creamy skinned, a movie-star mouth, dusky-lashed, and all without a trace of make-up. She’s also, of course, much slimmer than she looks on TV, “which is the most unflattering medium. Every single day of my life someone says, ‘Oooh, you’ve lost weight.’ You know, I went to Wimbledon yesterday and Venus Williams? Well, what a delicate little thing!”

Radio Times