Her successor, Mandi Norwood, then introduced "lots of 'shock! horror!' stories". The current editor, Lorraine Candy, "has brought it back to basics in a way."Of course, in Cosmo's heyday, it could flourish unchallenged in a market that featured merely Honey and Over 21 Nova collapsed two years after Cosmo's launch. There was no Elle, Marie Claire, New Woman, Red, Eve, InStyle or Glamour, and the celebrity magazine had yet to arrive. What is strange about the Cosmo of today is that, contrary to expectation, its ABC figures are sky-high. It may seem like a bright, brash dinosaur read by God-knows-who, but the July-December 2002 figure is 463,058. The figure for Marie Claire stands at 400,038, and for InStyle at 175,245. For most of its three decades, Cosmopolitan has been the towering market-leader.

It was finally Glamour (latest ABC: 537,474) that broke the mould But, as Kelsey says, "It's a different magazine. It's half the price, and it's very much fast food."It would be impossible in today's climate for Cosmo to have the social significance it once did. But what has changed is the culture, the market, and not the magazine. "The things that have stayed constant in the magazine are the things that have actually enabled its success to endure," says Kelsey. "And I think it has always been fundamentally about relationships, which are always going to be of interest to women.

If it went down the celebrity route, it just wouldn't do it as well as the celebrity magazines do. If it sold itself as a fashion and beauty magazine – well, plenty of others do that. Nobody does relationships like Cosmo does."But is the product time-warped? "When Marie Claire first came out, it had a kind of badge of style, and panache about it, and I don't think that Cosmo has that, but the women who buy it clearly don't care. Because it isn't fashionable, I don't think it's ever going to go out of fashion."After her reign at Cosmo, Kelsey went on to relaunch and edit She. "I really knew what I wanted to say with that magazine, and succeeded." Sales shot up by 40 per cent.

Now 50, she is the mother of 14-year Thomas and is married to Christian She works as a freelance journalist and is writing a novel And there's her Cosmo book "I'm so glad to have been a Cosmo girl," she says. "Both in my life and my work."'Was It Good for You, Too?' is published on Thursday by Robson Books at £16.95. Gerald Kaufman, the combative chairman of the Commons select committee on culture, found himself in a sticky spot when, at the committee's hearing into media breaches of privacy, it found itself accused of the very same. Details of people "monstered" by the press were inadvertently distributed to press covering the deliberations. Mike Jempson, director of the Presswise Trust, which helps victims of media intrusion, made a complaint, and Kaufman was forced to apologise.