Cassandra Jardine

Cassandra Caroline Mary Jardine (16 November 1954 – 29 May 2012) was a British journalist, best known as a contributor to The Daily Telegraph over a twenty-year period.

Born in London, the youngest of three daughters, her parents were Anne, a Conservative councillor in Kensington and Chelsea, and Christopher Jardine, a civil servant.^[1] In 1972, as the Under Secretary at the Department of Trade and Industry, although later "vindicated", he was accused of "negligence" after a car insurance company collapsed.^[2] Cassandra Jardine was educated at the Godolphin and Latymer School and read English at Newnham College, Cambridge.^[1]

After Jardine graduated from Cambridge University in 1976, she became an assistant to the Daily Telegraph contributor T.E. Utley and later spent a period working for Cosmopolitan,^[3] Unilever's internal publication and Business magazine.^[4] She returned to the Daily Telegraph on 29 March 1989^[5] as a feature writer and interviewed several hundred public figures over the years before latterly writing about health for the newspaper.

She was diagnosed with lung cancer in July 2010, specifically adenocarcinoma.^[6] She began to write about her illness, and won the Lung Cancer Journalism award in 2011,^[7] and the Excellence in Oncology award in the same year.^[5] She wrote two books about parenting How to be a Better Parent: No Matter How Badly Your Children Behave or How Busy You Are (2003); and Positive Not Pushy: How to Make the Most of Your Child’s Potential (2005).^[1]

Jardine was married to the actor William Chubb; the couple had five children, 2 sons and 3 daughters who were aged between 13 and 22 at the time she died.^[8]

The Daily Telegraph has founded the annual Cassandra Jardine Prize for young women journalists in her honour.^[9]

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