Your instinct should be to loathe her — her milky skin, her Oxbridge education, kissed off with a double first. And yes, there’s more: as well as the double first, she spent as much time at university working on her acting career as her studies, the result of which is that she has already seen her name attached to several big British films, as well as theatre and television work. (When I ask how she achieved a double first while simultaneously pursuing an acting career, she replies: “I was filming in Croatia while I was preparing for it, and I felt so happy and chilled that I just didn’t worry. I learnt the whole of western philosophy in a week, in glorious sunshine.”) During her A-levels, she managed to cram in her essays between being flown to Milan for red-carpet dress fittings with Donatella V. She has shiny hair and a novelist boyfriend. She loves to write about politics — on top of the job she was invited to do at Vogue after work experience.
Burton-Hill is an ultra girl; she has never-ending layers of talent that reveal themselves like the skins on a large onion. She is the heiress to the title of alpha female, but she is more than a junior alpha: whereas alpha suggests a domineering and bullying character, competitive and full of it, ultras are, above all, nice and likeable. Burton-Hill is a high achiever, yet she worries, is a little insecure and likes a drink. She’s just like you and me — only much better.
I count among my acquaintances a few young and ambitious alpha females, and I’ve met my fair share of well-educated actresses and models — self-obsessed, aloof, snotty and ambitious frights who would trample on their mother, brother and lover to get to Harvey Weinstein or Tony Blair on the other side of a room. Ultra girl is different. Ultra girls are the product of the best of the late 20th century: good diet, dentistry, education and feminism. An essential part, beside their natural beauty and talent, is their sweet humility. Maggie Thatcher, for example, could only have been an alpha. Nigella Lawson crossed with Martha Lane Fox is probably the closest the older generations get to achieving ultra status.
Catherine Hurley, 25, was studying medicine at Oxford when she decided to take a year out to model. She never went back, because her career took off and, as it did, she developed an interest in nutrition. After several years of successful modelling — including working with Mario Testino and Nick Knight — this autumn, she starts a degree in nutrition and dietetics at King’s College London. Hurley says she is excited to be learning more about nutrition: “There is so much to be done to educate. The government’s recent guidelines on healthy eating are a start, but ...”. A detailed, passionate conversation follows, about food in schools and the importance of subsidising the British farming industry for the sake of the nation’s nutritional wellbeing.
All the money that Hurley has earned modelling is not spent on this season’s big sunglasses or trips to Chiva-Som. She puts her earnings into property, and manages her own portfolio of investments. I am about to put her down as more of an alpha when she reveals that she works for the Samaritans and eats cake every day.
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Sarah Solemani is currently juggling her second year at university studying politics with a flourishing career as a comedienne. As well as having informed opinions on subjects from Proust to Palestine, she can offer a telling ultra-girl didactic on the final episode of Sex and the City. “I felt great disappointment when the final words uttered by Samantha were something like, ‘I’ve never been loved by any man like you before.’ That show was about friendship, female camaraderie, the things I feel around me. It was about the ripening of womankind. Then that final episode wrapped it up in old-fashioned female neediness. A real travesty.”
Quentin Jones, 20, a successful model with Storm, about to go to Cambridge, and with a sideline in Lucian Freud-style portrait painting, sees sexism around her, yet dismisses its potency with a laugh and the wave of a delicate hand. “There is a laughable sort of mock-sexism prevalent at Cambridge in the societies that don’t allow females. But I know it is a good time to be a woman.”
Feminism does not figure in the world of the ultra girl: she does not feel anything as banal and old-fashioned as her gender holding her back. Sophie Winkleman, 23, has already been nominated for several acting awards and is currently writing a sitcom and comedy screenplay funded by the Arts Council. Her writing agent is one of the best in the business, and a big American name will star in it — “Gwyneth, perhaps.” (She claims she is lazy, though this does not manifest itself in a way you and I might be familiar with.) “There are so many great parts around for women these days,” she says. “I never come across a casting-couch scenario. I am adamant about no nudity, and I’m going to stick to it.” Ultra has morals, you see. So how does Winkleman see her future? Well, she likes baking cakes and giving them to people, and also likes “the thought of having 5,000 kids”.
Natasha Bedingfield likes extreme sports, rock-climbing and caving; songs she wrote in her teens are due to appear on Paul Oakenfold’s next album. Her favourite novelists are CS Lewis and Dickens, she did relief work in South America and began a psychology degree while motoring up her pop career. Her first single, about how great it is to be single, reached the Top 5.
Bedingfield, 22, says: “I have long worked in a field which is run by men, and it is essential I have a strong voice. Most female artists are forced into performing little more than a pole-dancing show, so I make strong demands about how I am represented. No skirts, no midriff, and I won’t expose too much chest and leg at the same time. Women shouldn’t have to do stripper-style dancing to sell their music.”
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Back in west London, Burton-Hill is telling me that she recently set up her own production company. “Doing art exhibitions, concerts, political education outreach, you know, bringing the arts to a wider audience.” Her phone rings — she can’t quite get it together. “Oh, God, I’m being so blonde,” she says, with typical ultra self-effacement, before going on to explain that the inspiration for the “political education outreach” is an Israeli/Palestinian youth orchestra set up by the late Edward Said and Daniel Barenboim. She patiently tells me who these two are, and even though I know who they are, I do not find this annoying, because Burton-Hill keeps reassuring me that, yes, she gets drunk a lot and has a season ticket at Arsenal. What’s not to like?
Ultra girls have boyfriends, scruples, cheekbones; they have hearts and hair of gold. They are feminine and funny. They are unbelievable. If ultra girls ran the world, the prisons of Baghdad would be like holiday camps and the world would be a better place. Let’s hope they all have 5,000 kids — we need them right now.