There’s one member of the royal family that most women of a certain age would truly like to hang out with, and that’s the Queen. Camilla gives every impression of enjoying a stiff gin, a risque joke and a crafty fag. Better still, she seems sufficiently down-to-earth to have little time for wokery. She’d give short shrift to men in dresses who think they have a right to be in female-only spaces. So of course Her Majesty met with the champion of women’s sex-based rights, JK Rowling, in Edinburgh this week. The only question is: why hasn’t this royal blessing happened sooner?
To our national shame, rather than being celebrated, Rowling is all too often overlooked or shunned
By any metric, Rowling should be a national treasure. Her Harry Potter books have been translated into 85 languages, and over 600 million copies have been sold worldwide. Our politicians can only look on with envy at Rowling’s soft cultural power in selling an image of Britain and Britishness across the globe.
Love him or loathe him, the boy wizard has, for three decades, got children reading. But it’s not just her own books that Rowling is interested in shifting. She has promoted children’s literacy more broadly through her philanthropic projects and advocacy work. This is something Rowling and the Queen have in common. Camilla has also used her royal platform to encourage everyone to read for pleasure.
