Rowling Gets Dacred

As I noted yesterday, Jo Rowling is not the Daily Mail’s kind of person. She has been a single parent, has dared to speak out about the less savoury behaviour of those who scrabble around the dunghill that is Grubstreet (including an appearance before the Leveson Inquiry during which she found adversely upon press intrusion), and has not been reliably conservative in her politics.

She should stick to Harry f***ing Potter, right, c***?!?

So it was inevitable that the legendarily foul mouthed Paul Dacre would order the most bitter and catty of his Glendas, Jan Moir, to write a hatchet job on the first Rowling adult novel The Casual Vacancy. Now it seems that the round of interviews prior to the book’s launch did not include the Mail, thus compounding the anger of the Vagina Monologue, and meaning that more smears and abuse would follow.

This has duly come to pass, with today’s rant entitled “Hypocrisy and the ruthless PR sorcery behing J K Rowling’s invasion of her own privacy”, under the by-line of Paul Bracchi. Why is Ms Rowling (who is always, in the antediluvian world of the Daily Mail, styled “Miss Rowling”) a hypocrite? Because Dacre has deemed it to be so. The facts will then be carefully selected to fit the narrative.

How does someone “invade their own privacy”? It’s a ridiculous concept: what the Mail really means is that Ms Rowling has given interviews to media outlets that do not meet with the approval of the Vagina Monologue. And which outlets are these? Have a guess: “favoured newspapers and broadcasters — namely, the Left-leaning Guardian and the BBC”. Rattle out of pram time, children!

And the literary world does not approve of the embargo on reviews for the new book before release date. We know this because Bracchi has quotes from “a highly respected literary editor”, who remains anonymous – to no surprise at all – while delivering the desired quotes, such as “it smacks of bullying”, which anyone who deals with Paul Dacre knows all about.

Ms Rowling, it is emphasised, “is worth an estimated £560 million”. The Casual Vacancy is alleged to be based on the village where she grew up, where “some folk there now feel betrayed”, but none are even quoted, let alone named. There is a particularly nasty allegation about Ms Rowling’s former agent, which will not be repeated here, as I fear it may be actionable.

Bracchi finally mentions the content of the book, but only briefly, and while getting another kick at the Guardian and BBC before sneering that Ms Rowling is “reportedly spending up to £250,000 on a pair of tree houses for her children in the garden of her Edinburgh residence”. What is the Mail’s problem? Jo Rowling has made her pile, and if she wants to keep hold of her intellectual property, that’s her call.

And no amount of attack pieces will get the Mail access to her. Get over it, Dacre.