Independent on Sunday, 19 February 2012

Imagine that you’re at the dentist. You discuss the treatment, settle back in the chair, open your mouth – and the dentist announces she’s invited the local vicar to say prayers before proceeding. Wouldn’t that seem weird, not to say annoying and inappropriate? A dentist’s surgery is not a place of worship and neither is a council chamber, despite all the hot air that’s been generated in the past few days about the “right” of believers to hold prayers during council meetings.

Entertaining though it is to hear so many bad arguments – I think God needs someone else to do his PR, instead of relying on Eric Pickles, Baroness Warsi and the Daily Mail – this isn’t an argument about believers’ human rights. It’s about religious people expecting to hold on to privileges they can’t justify, except by saying they’ve enjoyed them since time immemorial. Are they seriously claiming Christianity is under threat  because a court ruled that prayers can’t be an agenda item at council meetings? Now Pickles claims he’s overturned the ruling. As the American satirist Jon Stewart said last week in a different context: “You’ve confused the war on your religion with not always getting everything you want.”

The thing about secularists – and some secularists are believers – is that we get the difference. The Bideford council case wasn’t about an atheist councillor demanding to assert his non-belief in front of religious colleagues, any more than I insist that the historic oppression of women should be part of the official business at any meeting I attend. (Now, there’s an idea….) It’s about the principle that civic space is secular, which means not having special rules for one set of beliefs.

Modern democracies are made up of millions of individuals who are entitled to believe what they like, as long as they obey the law and don’t discriminate against people they dislike. That’s been the central issue in a slew of legal cases brought by religious  organisations and individuals; in a not exactly shining example of Christian charity, the Roman Catholic Church has closed its adoption agencies in England rather than obey a law that says they can’t turn away prospective parents who happen to be gay. The head of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, Trevor Phillips, entered the debate last week, bluntly telling faith groups that provide public services that they can’t say they’re entitled to a different set of laws from everyone else.

Phillips compared Christians who don’t want to observe equality laws with Muslims who want to impose sharia, prompting a furious reaction. But the principle that secular law rumps religious belief is absolutely right; it’s a bulwark against religious intolerance, and sorely needed in a country where belief still enjoys far too many privileges. It’s bizarre that Christian prayers are still said at the start of Parliamentary business; there’s a daily stampede of peers arriving late in the House Lords, struggling to get a seat because they’ve waited until prayers are over. Are Christians really entitled to the best seats? And if Christianity is under attack, why are my taxes funding so many “faith” schools?

Whenever I hear the phrase “militant secularism”, I know that someone, somewhere, isn’t getting their own way. It means we’re moving towards a society which is less hierarchical, more open and tolerant, and where everyone has exactly the same rights. Now there’s something I’m militantly in favour of, like the very best chocolate and expensive shoes.

Independent on Sunday, 12 February 2012

It’s official: the BBC has a problem with older women. The director-general, Mark Thompson, has admitted as much, acknowledging that the BBC’s treatment of Strictly judge Arlene Phillips and former Countryfile presenter Miriam O’Reilly – she won an age discrimination case against the corporation – has damaged its image. There are “manifestly too few older women broadcasting on the BBC”, Thompson admitted. The only bit of that sentence I take issue with is the word “older”.

The BBC has a problem with women, full stop. In recent weeks Radio 4′s Today programme has come in for a pasting because so few of its interviewees are female. Four of its five regular presenters are men, and so are the presenters of Any Questions, Start the Week and Question Time. After the 2010 general election, I remember asking whether women broadcasters had succumbed en masse to a virus which kept them off air while their male colleagues talked themselves into a state of exhaustion.

To be fair, it isn’t just the BBC where women don’t have the visibility you would expect in the modern world. When Lord Leveson held seminars for senior journalists before his inquiry into the media got under way, I was astonished by how few women were present. So was a shadow minister, who asked me where they all were. But the BBC is publicly funded and we have a right to expect “a higher standard of fairness and open-mindedness in its treatment both of its broadcasters and its audiences”. Those are Thompson’s words, not mine, and I’d say the BBC is failing on both counts.

I’ve been appearing on BBC TV and radio for years. I’ve got used to being the only  oman – it’s happened to me on Start the Week and Question Time – and I’m also used to being heavily outnumbered by men. It doesn’t bother me much, but I know other women feel unnerved by the prospect of walking into a male-dominated environment. Nor is there any doubt in my mind that this gender imbalance affects the tone of programmes, which can be sneering and hostile. On last week’s Moral Maze on Radio 4, Michael Portillo began by insulting me and then talked over me each time I started  answering a question. It reminded me of an edition of Newsnight – hilariously, I’d been invited on to talk about religious intolerance – when an imam tried to shout me down.

The gender breakdown on Wednesday evening’s Moral Maze (it was repeated last night and is on iPlayer) was seven men and two women. On that bizarre edition of Newsnight, the other four guests were men: the imam, a bishop, a Muslim convert and someone from Christian Voice. In the event, the man from Christian Voice got stuck on a train (I assumed it was God’s will) and the final line-up was three against one. As well as having the best arguments, I was definitely wearing the best shoes.

As I once explained to Robin Cook, who was one of the best speakers of his generation, I am unusual in having a formal training in rhetoric. I grew up on Cicero, which isn’t a background many women can draw on when they find themselves in a BBC studio. But I don’t think they should have to, any more than I believe that this combative style of broadcasting appeals to female audiences. I’m not sure men like it much either, judging by the messages I got after the Moral Maze. So perhaps the real problem with the BBC is this: too few women, too many alpha males.

Prayers are not part of official council business, High Court rules

Friday 10 February 2012

Congratulations to the National Secular Society, which today won a lengthy battle to establish that prayers should not be part of a council’s official agenda. The NSS backed a councillor on Bideford Town Council in Devon, who did not want to leave the room after the full meeting started while prayers were said by a cleric.

No one is arguing that councillors who have religious beliefs cannot pray on their own or with other councillors before the meeting. Bideford Council was offered the option of removing prayers from the official agenda and giving councillors time to do that. It refused, and that is why the case went to the High Court.

This is not, as it is being portrayed in some quarters, an attack on Christians. It establishes an important principle, namely that religion is a private matter and has no place in the official business of a body elected to represent people of different faiths and none. I have argued for years that public space in this country should be secular, and that the secular principle protects believers, atheists and agnostics alike from oppressive behaviour.

Today’s judgement is welcome, and overdue. The process of turning this country into a modern, secular democracy goes on….

If you would like to read the judgement in full, you can find it here: http://www.secularism.org.uk/uploads/bideford-judgment-final.pdf

If you would like to know more about the work of the National Secular Society, which I support, you can use this link: www.secularism.org.uk

Independent on Sunday, 5 February 2012

Here is the brutal truth about Syria: no one knows what to do. Six months after Barack Obama said bluntly that Bashar al-Assad should go, and with the Arab League calling for him to resign, there is no sign that the country’s President is willing to listen. Two days ago, on the 30th anniversary of the massacre carried out by his father Hafez al-Assad in the city of Hama, the younger Assad ordered the Syrian army to bombard residential areas of the country’s third largest city, Homs. Shocking TV pictures showed buildings ablaze against the night sky, the wounded rushed to makeshift casualty  stations inside mosques.

Even these horrors were not enough to dissuade Russia and China yesterday from vetoing a draft UN Security Council resolution endorsing the Arab League’s plan for Assad to go. The Syrian President can also rely on the region’s chief mischief-maker, Iran, whose leaders’ terrible human rights record shows that they are unlikely to worry about his regime massacring its own people. There’s little point in appealing to Assad’s finer instincts: the dynasty is founded on torture and repression. What’s happening on the streets is simply an extension of what has gone in Syria’s political prisons for many years.

A decade ago, the Blair government feted Bashar al-Assad during a visit to London, hoping it could come to a modus vivendi with the Syrian tyrant as it was trying to do with Libya’s Colonel Gaddafi. Both regimes welcomed overtures from democratic nations, reading them (as we now know) as a carte blanche to continue doing whatever they liked to their own people. Gaddafi is dead, lynched by a militia group, but Assad is a harder nut to crack. Calls for international intervention remain muted because it would carry the risk of an escalation involving Iran and Hezbollah, further destabilising Lebanon and turning the crisis into a regional conflict.

With a stalemate developing and neither government forces nor the opposition able to achieve a decisive victory, the international community has regrettably few options. Yet the images coming out of Syria become more shocking by the day; unlike in 1982, when Hafez al-Assad bombed Hama and the details of the massacre took years to emerge, modern technology means that atrocities are reported as they happen. “My city is bleeding,” a young man tweeted from Homs in the early hours yesterday. “We’re being attacked since 8pm. 5 hours, 230 dead, 800 injured.” Last night there was confusion about the likely death toll.

Savage repression of the uprising is likely to drive Assad’s opponents into more desperate tactics, while increasing the likelihood of sectarian conflict between Syria’s majority Sunni population and its Alawite (Shia) ruling elite. Already, Alawite families are said to be leaving Damascus and returning to their home villages, while families and businesses in the capital are having to cope with power cuts and steep rises in fuel prices. Economic sanctions are biting but it’s clear that Assad is prepared to do anything to stay in power.

As the extent of Friday’s massacre in Homs becomes clear, the international community must work out how to support, train and organise the opposition. In Libya, the Nato bombardment of Gaddafi’s military installations was accompanied by a less-publicised project to instil discipline into the militias which had sprung up to oppose the regime. In Syria, a mixture of recklessly brave civilians and army defectors faces well-armed forces whose leaders remain loyal to the Assad family. It’s unlikely they can overthrow the dictator on their own, and the moral and practical case for giving them the
assistance they need is becoming unanswerable.

Update, Monday 6 Feb: Assad forces bombarding Homs again, see report here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/feb/06/syrian-forces-homs-bombardment

Independent on Sunday, 22 January 2012

It’s been a dreadful week for free speech. A meeting at a prestigious London college had to be abandoned on Monday evening when members of the audience were filmed and threatened by an Islamic extremist. Then the president of a student society at another London college was forced to resign after a Muslim organisation called for a ban on a jokey image of the Prophet Mohammed. Finally, on Friday, the author Sir Salman Rushdie cancelled an appearance at India’s largest literary festival, saying he feared an assassination attempt after protests by Muslim clerics.

Almost as sinister as this series of events has been the reaction to them. The first has received very little public attention, despite the fact that students who belong to the college’s Atheism, Secularism and Humanism Society were unable to go ahead with a perfectly legal discussion of sharia law. They’d come to Queen Mary College, University of London, to hear Anne Marie Waters speak on behalf of the One Law For All campaign, when an angry young man entered the lecture theatre. He stood at the front and used his mobile phone to film the audience, claiming he knew where they lived and would track them down if a single negative word was said about the Prophet. The organisers informed the police and the meeting was cancelled.

The fact that in a democratic country a religious extremist is able to frighten anyone into calling off a meeting is shocking – and so is the lack of a public outcry about this egregious example of intimidation and censorship. Tellingly, what has grabbed media attention is the second incident, when a secularist organisation at University College, London, came under attack for publishing an image on its Facebook page of “Jesus and Mo” having a drink together. The Muslim group that wants to ban the image got a sympathetic hearing in the media, despite arguing openly for censorship. Extremist websites, meanwhile, reacted with the fanatical language that so often appears on such sites: “May Allah destroy these creatures worse than dogs,” wrote one blogger.

No doubt that kind of inflammatory sentiment was in Rushdie’s mind when he decided not to appear at the Jaipur Literary Festival. In a statement read out there, the author of The Satanic Verses said he’d been warned that paid assassins from the Mumbai unrworld might be on their way to the event in order to eliminate” him. While he xpressed doubts about the accuracy of the warnings, Rushdie said it would be irresponsible of him to appear in such circumstances.

Why hasn’t there been a furore about all these incidents? Why aren’t MPs and ministers insisting on the vital role of free speech? None of the people involved was threatening anybody, unlike the three Muslim extremists convicted two days ago of inciting hatred against homosexuals. It’s been left to organisations such as the National Secular Society – I’m an honorary associate – to say that a fundamental human right is being eroded in the name of avoiding “offence”.

Most people in the UK don’t condone violence, but a worrying number think we should be careful around individuals with strongly-held religious beliefs. This argument is mistaken, because it suggests that believers aren’t as capable or under exactly the same obligation to exercise, judgement and restraint as the rest of us.

It’s also based on fear, tacitly acknowledging a link between demands for censorship and threats of violence. One often leads to the other, and it isn’t just atheists and secularists who should be very worried indeed about that.

Now here’s a link to Nick Cohen:  http://www.spectator.co.uk/nickcohen/7596548/how-freedom-goes.thtml

Yesterday confirmed the degree of suspicion that was created between husbands and wives

The Independent, Friday 20 January 2012

The court was packed, so much so that the judge told late-comers they could be “undecorous” and sit on the floor. I got there early, expecting a crush, and managed to get a seat as the phone-hacking scandal reached one of its periodic peaks. On 18 separate occasions, a lawyer got up and described the extent of the News of the World‘s surveillance operation on particular individuals, from the actor Jude Law to the former Deputy Prime Minister Lord Prescott. It was a shameful catalogue of phone hacking, blagging, harassment and interception of emails.

And on 18 occasions, News International’s counsel, Michael Silverleaf QC, had to get up and apologise to the individual concerned. It was an unenviable task and he performed it doggedly, using the formal language agreed in advance by both sides. Because the list of victims was alphabetical, I had to wait until close to the end of the morning to get my apology. But it was worth the wait, bringing to an end an extraordinary period in my life which began nine months ago, when I was contacted by a detective from Operation Weeting.

A month after that I saw the notes made about me in 2004 by a private detective, Glenn Mulcaire, who’d been asked to spy on me and my then partner by a journalist from the News of the World. I guess it was all in a day’s work for Mulcaire. I don’t know if he was even aware that my partner’s eldest daughter had been killed in an accident only six weeks earlier. Mulcaire did know that I wrote for another News International title, The Times, because he made a note of it. He also knew I was going to Spain – he made a note of that as well – though possibly not that I was due to speak about the importance of free expression at an international writers’ conference.

It’s easy to joke about phone hacking and think it’s of little consequence. Some people assume that the silent listeners had to sit through dozens of mundane messages about picking up dry-cleaning, but my experience and that of other victims suggests it was much more serious than that. One of the reasons I was so angry was the sickening realisation that strangers had listened to my voicemails in the aftermath of a private tragedy.

Yesterday’s statements in open court confirmed the degree of suspicion created between husbands and wives, friends and employees, who couldn’t understand how intensely private material was ending up in a national newspaper. Back in 2002 or 2003, the suggestion that hundreds of public figures and people close to them were under illegal surveillance by journalists would have seemed like something out of a thriller.

It’s also important to point out that until quite recently, News International was intending to contest many of these cases. Remember the “rogue” reporter defence? News International’s lawyers actually entered defences in some of the cases they’ve just settled, changing their position only after our lawyers kept returning to court. The result was nine separate disclosures that showed the astonishing scale of phone hacking, and what our lawyers describe bluntly as a “cover up”.

Of the 18 cases settled yesterday, only a handful of us have chosen to keep our compensation awards private. I’ve accepted £27,500 plus costs, which I think reflects  he gravity of what happened at the News of the World. Our lawyers said that we, the victims, feel vindicated by the settlements. We no longer feel we have to persuade others that bad things were done to us – and I hope it means they won’t ever be done to anyone else. The last few months have been gruelling, but my faith in decent, ethical journalism remains unshaken.

Sunday Times, 15 Jan 2012

With telling insight, two authors deal with the effects of violence on the very young in this roundup of recent crime novels

The impact of violence on children is a sensitive subject. It calls for special interviewing skills and a realisation that the victim may be too traumatised to talk about what’s happened, even if it impedes an urgent  investigation. This is the dilemma facing an Austrian detective, Criminal Commissioner Kovacs, in a striking new novel by the award-winning Viennese writer Paulus Hochgatterer.

Hochgatterer is a child psychiatrist and won the 2009 European Literature prize with his first novel, The Sweetness of Life. The Mattress  House, translated by Jamie Bulloch (Quercus £18.99/ebook £18.99) is set in a picturesque Alpine village whose residents turn up with disturbing frequency in the psychiatric department of the local hospital. Patients slash themselves with razors and post distressing photographs of each other on the internet while their psychiatrist, Raffael Horn, is distracted by anxieties about his marriage and struggles to understand a series of child abductions. The children are all of primary-school age and they reappear with bruises on their shoulders, talking about a sinister “black owl”. Horn and Kovacs come under pressure from worried local people to find the perpetrator, not realising that the beatings are a pointer to something nfinitely more sinister. In a country still haunted by the notorious crimes of Josef Fritzl, The Mattress House offers surreal but telling insights into the minds of young victims.

Belinda Bauer burst onto the scene two years ago when her first novel, Blacklands, was judged CWA crime novel of the year. Her third novel, Finders Keepers (Bantam 4.99/ebook £8.99), has a similar theme to The Mattress House, but her plot about a series of child abductions takes the reader into very different territory. Bauer has established a reputation for plunging her characters into unimaginable gore and her third novel easily matches her previous efforts, exposing village bobby Jonas Holly - still recovering from a narrow escape from death in an earlier outing — to events  unprecedented in British crime fiction. The British countryside has never appeared so alien or macabre.

Simon Lelic’s The Child Who (Mantle £12.99/ebook £8.99) is written under the shadow of the 1993 James Bulger case. A 12-year-old boy, Daniel Blake, has been arrested on suspicion of the murder of a schoolgirl, and the case raises predictable passions. The main character is the boy’s solicitor, Leo Curtice, whose mixed motives include genuine curiosity about the boy and an urge to make a splash with the case. Lelic’s earlier novels drew critical acclaim and his first, Rupture, won a Betty Trask award. But he is an uneven writer, with a taste for sensational subject matter and frequent lurches in tone. When Curtice’s own daughter disappears, the plot loses focus and takes off in a frankly unbelievable direction, leaving behind a general impression of messiness.

Elly Griffiths sets her novels on the bleak Norfolk coast, where Ruth Galloway, her archeologist-detective, lives in an isolated cottage. Galloway is an engaging character, a single mother who wrestles with self-doubt and a fraught relationship with a married detective. A Room Full of Bones (Quercus £16.99/ebook £16.99) opens in a dusty private museum in King’s Lynn where the coffin of a medieval bishop is about to be opened. Galloway arrives early to find the curator dead on the floor, and shortly afterwards the museum’s owner dies in mysterious circumstances. Griffiths’s novels occupy a world where modern science and new-age mysticism coexist, but her characters’ flights of fancy are leavened by common sense and humanity.

Peter May’s novels also have a rural setting, this time the sparsely populated Isle of Lewis. In The Lewis Man (Quercus £12.99/ebook £12.99) a perfectly preserved corpse is discovered by peat-cutters who assume it’s thousands of years old. Knife wounds and an Elvis tattoo dispel that impression, and DNA tests establish that the dead man is related to an island woman, Marsaili Macdonald, who always believed she had no close relatives other than her father Tormod. Marsaili’s former boyfriend, Fin Macleod, is drawn into the investigation despite the fact that he’s given up his job as a police  inspector in Edinburgh. His discovery that Tormod isn’t who he claims to be uncovers a long-buried scandal involving children sent from city orphanages to island families, where they were used as unpaid labour. There is a clunky plot twist towards the end, involving a not very plausible gangster, but otherwise it’s well worth reading.

Tom Benn’s The Doll Princess (Cape £12.99/ebook £13.56) is a first novel from a graduate of the University of East Anglia creative-writing course, and it comes with high expectations. Set in Manchester in 1996, soon after part of the city centre was destroyed by an IRA bomb, the novel is about sex-trafficking and conflicts between gangs. It starts with the deaths of two young women (an Egyptian socialite and a local prostitute) and goes from bad to worse. Neither woman is remotely credible and it is narrated by Bane, a thug with a conscience, in a tiresome Manchester dialect. Violent and cartoonish, the novel is the literary equivalent of being stuck in an early Guy Ritchie
film.

Stuart Neville’s Stolen Souls (Harvill Secker £12.99/ebook £8.99) is a much more satisfying book, dealing in a humane way with the plight of trafficked women. It is set in rainy Belfast over Christmas, where an East European woman is on the run after killing one of her Lithuanian captors. With nowhere to hide, Galya accepts an offer of shelter, only to find herself threatened by a different kind of predator. A weary but decent police inspector, Jack Lennon, has the job of finding her before she falls victim to any of her pursuers. Scary, but always humane.

Independent on Sunday, 15 January 2012

During the election campaign two years ago, one of David Cameron’s big selling-points was his intention to create a Big Society. He was short on detail but the general idea but the general idea was that a Conservative government would encourage volunteering and get us more involved in our communities. I’m not against any of that but I suspected it might turn into something more coercive, along the lines of the workfare schemes which have been so controversial in the United States.

Now, after 20 months of the coalition, we’re beginning to get a sense of how the Big Society will operate. Imagine an unemployed graduate who volunteers to work in a local museum while claiming Jobseeker’s Allowance. She enjoys the work, feels she’s doing something useful and hopes the experience will eventually lead to a paid job. Everyone benefits and it’s exactly what the Government wants the unemployed to do – the Big Society in action.

So why is the Government forcing people like Cait Reilly to give up a placement in a museum to work unpaid in a branch of a hugely successful discount chain? Ms Reilly, who is 22 and gets the princely sum of £53.45 in weekly benefits, had to stop doing voluntary work at the Pen Room Museum in Birmingham when she was sent to work at a branch of the budget store, Poundland. Ms Reilly was told she risked losing her Jobseeker’s Allowance if she turned down the two-week placement, but she also understood it would lead to a period of training and a job interview. She says she and five other claimants swept floors and stacked shelves, and she didn’t get an interview.

Poundland sells everything in its stores for £1 and has bucked the prevailing economic trend. Turnover increased by 25.8 per cent to £642m in the 12 months to March 2011, while profits were up by 34 per cent to £31.7m. Its shelves have to be stacked by somebody and it seems reasonable to ask why the company can’t use some of its soaring profits to create real jobs, even if they pay the minimum wage.

Last week, Ms Reilly became a whipping-girl for the right-wing press when it emerged that she’s launching a legal action against the Government. Indignant commentators missed the point, possibly because of their reflexive loathing of the Human Rights Act which outlaws “forced or compulsory” labour. Ms Reilly’s solicitor, Jim Duffy, argues that Jobcentres are forcing people into “futile, unpaid labour for weeks or months at a time” in contravention of the Act.

His concerns echo a study commissioned by the Labour government in 2008, which looked at workfare schemes in the US, Canada and Australia. The researchers found little evidence that workfare increases the likelihood of finding permanent jobs, while it reduces the time available to look for paid work. There’s also the danger that workfare replaces paid jobs with unpaid ones, institutionalising poverty while doing little to bring down unemployment.

I don’t have any problem with the unemployed doing something in return for benefits. Many charities and social organisations are crying out for volunteers, and a sense of doing something worthwhile lifts self-esteem. If Cameron means what he says, he could take the simple step of ensuring that no one is required to work without pay for a commercial organisation. Otherwise, the Big Society will start to look like a cover for yet more favours for big business.

The New York Post raised the spectre of a woman making a covert bid for power

The Independent, Monday 9 January 2012

I’ve never given much thought to Lady Macbeth’s political views, but it’s probably safe to say she wasn’t overly concerned with her husband’s plans for healthcare. In our more enlightened times, everyone knows women have their own opinions and tensions are
likely to surface in a political marriage. That’s why some simple rules have been devised to help clever women negotiate the minefield: bake cookies, support your man, attend fund-raisers, support your man. Are you listening, Michelle Obama?

Apparently not, judging by reaction to a new book about the Obamas. Its author, Jodi Kantor, says aides to the President told her about a “grim” situation in his inner circle two years ago, with much of the conflict apparently caused by Mrs Obama’s uncertainty about her role. Kantor’s book appears to be a serious attempt to analyse the problems the Obamas encountered in the White House. But, in an election year and with the high hopes that greeted Obama’s presidency mostly unrealised, it’s been seized upon by political opponents.

The New York Post described Mrs Obama as a “behind-the-scenes force in the White House”, raising the spectre of a woman making a covert bid for power. Kantor writes more soberly about “a first lady who disapproved of the turn the White House had taken, and a chief of staff who chafed against her influence”. Mrs Obama opposed Rahm Emanuel’s appointment as her husband’s chief of staff, clashed with him on healthcare and was turned down when she asked to attend his morning staff meetings. Kantor claims the President sided with his wife against Emanuel and pursued a vision “more in line with the one he shared with the First Lady”. Emanuel resigned in October 2010.

A wife discussing politics with her husband? I expect it took hostile commentators all of three seconds to summon to mind the requisite historical comparison. Critics of Mrs Obama, a British newspaper reported yesterday, “view her as a Lady Macbeth figure”. I assume this is a reference to the infamous episode when Mrs Obama urged her husband to assassinate Mitt Romney – or do I mean Newt Gingrich? And I’m wondering whether Mrs Obama could be related to the “militantly ball-breaking” Spanish lawyer Miriam Gonzalez Durantez, whose views on sharing childcare – she is married to Nick Clegg – caused adverse comment last year.

Actually, the biggest thing going for Obama at the moment is the choice collection of weirdos competing for the Republican nomination. I can see that the notion of embracing gender equality could be a stretch for some candidates, and Michelle Obama isn’t exactly a Stepford wife. But attacks on the partners of centre-left politicians speak volumes about a culture that’s still struggling with the idea of a relationship between equals. Shouldn’t politics be about more than a contest over who has the biggest balls?

The Author, Winter 2011

Are you doing Hay? Have you been invited to Cheltenham? Did you hear Richard Dawkins, Martina Cole, Bill Clinton? At some point in the last couple of decades, literature became part of the entertainment industry, sending authors round the country to discuss their writing habits, where they get their ideas from and what they think about their peers. Sometimes a well-known writer makes headlines, usually when he or she plunges into the age-old debate about literary versus popular fiction. Biography is another promising area, especially if someone has unearthed new information about a subject’s sexuality or eccentric domestic habits. Publishers love it and so do the media. Branding is as important for writers these days as it is for footballers and pop stars, as this advertising campaign for a best-selling crime writer – sorry, that should be blockbuster crime brand’ – demonstrates: ‘National outdoor poster advertising will reach 6m shoppers and commuters….Highly targeted online campaign, including Facebook advertising, blogger outreach and video trailer seeding….Joint competitions, cross promotion and in-DVD advertising’. I have to say that ‘blogger outreach’ sounds to me like something that might be carried out by Social Services, aimed at individuals so tied to their computers that they never leave the house. But some authors take to this game with gusto, embracing their ‘brand’ with the enthusiasm of an actor who’s finally been offered the chance to play Cleopatra or Hamlet.

Actually, singing at the Albert Hall may be a better analogy, given that this is about writing as showbiz. The days when an author could stay at home, writing books and behaving like just another human being, are long gone; in this universe, J D Salinger’s lifelong reluctance to be interviewed appears not merely eccentric but perverse. I know that authors have always had public lives, up to a point: Lord Byron’s popularity turned into notoriety because of the drama of his marriage and affairs, while Charles Dickens famously exhausted himself by reading emotional scenes from his novels in front of an audience. Many contemporary writers use their fame to support campaigns, whether it’s promoting literacy and free expression or endorsing political parties. For me, writing has always been inextricably bound up with politics and I’m happy to talk in public about human rights, secularism and the role of a free press. What I’m less happy about is the endless self-promotion and self-exposure required of writers, mirroring the relentless rise of narcissism right across popular culture.

Members of the public flock to see their favourite authors at festivals and in bookshops, queuing for signed copies and confiding that they’d love to be writers themselves. There’s no mystery about that: for many people who don’t know the literary world, writing isn’t about the hard slog of sitting alone day after day, struggling to find the right phrase or come up with a cogent piece of analysis. It’s about being up there on the stage, accepting compliments from an admiring audience, or sitting at the same table as Ruth Rendell and Stephen Fry. In bookshops, appearances by best-selling authors are advertised in much the same way as the opportunity to meet a contestant from Celebrity Big Brother (and sometimes, of course, the two things are synonymous).

There is a problem here. Hardly anyone is prepared to say it, but it should be obvious that public performance has very little to do with writing. It is possible to be a skilled public performer who talks fluently about the process of writing, but the two abilities are almost entirely unrelated. Someone who has written a memoir may have struggled for years with painful memories and internal conflicts, a process that’s bearable on the page but not in front of an audience; a novel that’s become a classic may have initially received lukewarm reviews, creating feelings of rejection and neglect its author does not wish to acknowledge in public. Even if neither of these cases applies, there is no reason why someone who has written a book should automatically want to discuss it in front of an audience and answer personal or inconsequential questions. For many authors, writing is a much more tentative, uncertain and fragile process than publishers’ publicity machines are prepared to admit.

The demand for writers-as-performers is ubiquitous. It’s also based on a series of myths, not least the notion that published authors have special knowledge about the process of writing. Would-be writers are sometimes obsessed with the mechanics yet it’s fairly obvious that what works for one person – writing 500 words each morning, or for three days at a stretch, or in a shed at the bottom of the garden – doesn’t necessarily work for someone else. I realised a long time ago that anyone who wants to write has to discover his or her individual writing pattern, and knowing how or where J K Rowling does it isn’t relevant to that.

Another myth is that meeting authors will provide insights into their books, as though there’s something missing from the work that can be discovered only by questioning them in person; it’s this theory that produces those stilted, not to say embarrassing, ‘interviews’ that sometimes appear tacked on at the end of novels. It’s an unlikely proposition, given that writing is so dependent on the unconscious mind, and writers are left treading precariously along the line between boasting and saying something interesting. I’ve often felt for authors who are clearly doing their best not to sound like deranged egomaniacs but I’ve also shared platforms – and here my point about narcissism is relevant again – with writers whose sole purpose is to talk about themselves as much as possible. Sometimes, it’s even occurred to me that there may be an inverse relationship between a talent for self-promotion and the ability to write.

The entry of showbiz values into the business of authorship means that some publishers are looking for ‘personalities’, larger-than-life characters they know how to promote, as much as writers with original talent. This is particularly true of non-fiction, where the best-seller lists are dominated by famous comedians, TV tie-ins and the occasional footballer’s memoir, but it also has an impact on fiction. Increasingly, novelists need to be able to sell themselves as well as their books, a demand that works against anyone who is reticent by nature or reluctant to jostle for attention. And that has an effect not just on the volumes that get onto bestseller lists but the question of who gets published in the first place. That matters more than ever at a time when so many mid-list – and as yet unpublished – authors are struggling.

In any society, the boundary between public and private life shifts and wavers. The phone hacking scandal that destroyed the News of the World last summer suggests that it’s been drawn in the wrong place for quite some time, turning private life into a commodity. Something similar has happened in publishing, where the assumption that writers are public figures – and indeed public property – is almost unquestioned. No doubt the prospect of becoming a media ‘personality’ appeals to some authors, but others are quite reasonably dismayed by it. A literary culture that favours performance over the unshowy skills of authorship is a bad thing for literature and for writers.