Night moves

Watching Jacquetta Wheeler at work is like seeing a Fifties fashion plate come to life. She's all sharp angles and impossibly slender limbs, effortlessly elegant and poised. But afterwards, dressed down in leggings, biker boots and black leather jacket, with her freshly dyed peroxide blonde hair hidden under a baggy beanie hat, she's warm and chatty. She is clearly bright, but also slightly vague and detached, often letting her sentences evaporate. Not at all the untouchable patrician beauty of her photographs.

Her background is certainly privileged: her father is Stuart Wheeler, the spread-betting entrepreneur who became the Conservatives biggest single donor when he gave the party £5 million in 2001, and her mother is the society photographer Tessa Codrington. They live in Chilham Castle in Kent and there is also a family house in Tangiers. But grand as it all sounds, Stuart Wheeler always made it clear that he expects his children to make their own way in life.

These include a stint working on Barack Obama's election campaign. 'My little sister was in America working for the campaign and suggested it,' she explains, stirring sugar into her cup of tea. 'And I've long had a sort of infatuation with Obama.' She was sent to Bloomsburg, a small university town in Pennsylvania, for the final two weeks of the campaign.

'It was the hardest work I've ever done; it was so intense. Everybody there was absolutely and completely obsessed with Obama winning.' She spent long days on the university campus, persuading students to register to vote and talking them through Obama's policies. On election day she was outside the polling station from seven in the morning until eight at night, convincing them to stay in line when they got bored waiting. 'We managed to get way more students to register than ever before,' she beams with evangelical fervour.

They are clearly a close family, and Jacquetta was at her father's side when he met members of his long-lost family in Scotland recently.

Adopted as a baby, he had never met any blood relations until this year, at 73, he tracked down some distant cousins. 'It was really amazing. I mean, we always knew that my dad was adopted,' says a wide-eyed Jacquetta now, 'but we never really thought that we might discover family.' There was even old video footage of her grandmother walking, she says, exactly the same way her father does, with her hands held behind her back just like him.

Jacquetta has rented out her Manhattan apartment and is back in the Notting Hill flat she bought years ago but has never lived in. She's redecorating, making it a proper home, and is 'happily single', having been in a relationship with the handsome photographer Alexi Lubomirski (they met on a shoot in 2002, when he was assisting Mario Testino) until last year.

She has, she says, been single 'most of the time' since. 'I'm enjoying spending time with my friends and focusing on myself, particularly my writing and my photography.' And with that, she rushes off to catch a flight to New York, still very much a model for now.