The arrogant Alastair Campbell was no match for the great JK Rowling

Friendship is fine, love is divine and liquor is quicker, but there is nothing like a feud, especially when it’s between writers, who habitually hurl around words like nunchucks. Gore Vidal wrote that, ‘The three saddest words in the English language are Joyce Carol Oates’ and ‘My first impression – as I wasn’t wearing my glasses – was that it was a colourful ottoman. When I sat down on it, it squealed. It was Truman Capote.’ Truman Capote wrote that Jacqueline Susann looked like ‘a truck driver in drag’. ‘Every word she writes is a lie, including “and” and “the”’, said Mary McCarthy of Lillian Hellman. Flannery O’Connor on Ayn Rand: ‘She makes Mickey Spillane look like Dostoevsky.’ I’ve had some lovely feuds with fellow writers. I called Martin Amis ‘A small man in every way it is possible for a man to be small’, and told Camille Paglia to ‘Fuck off, you crazy old dyke!’.

But the trouble – and the real fun, the sadistic rather than the sporting kind – happens when a bad writer thinks they can ‘take on’ a good writer. It makes it especially entertaining if the first is a man and the latter a woman, due to the element of ‘mansplaining’, which we will see magnificently quashed. Even better if the woman is beautiful and the man unattractive, giving it a feeling of a troll trying to capture a warrior queen.

I’m describing, of course, the current ‘feud’ between JK Rowling – Saint Joanne, protector of tomboys and benefactor of homeless women – and Alastair Campbell, most famous as Tony Blair’s Groom of the Stool. Campbell, I’d wager, wanted to be known as a writer for a very long time, all those years when he was a liar-for-hire; his 2015 publication, Winners and How They Succeed, was swiftly available on Amazon for the poignant sum of 98p. Then, in 2024, after becoming a successful podcaster, he published his 18th book, But What Can I Do? Why Politics Has Gone So Wrong and How You Can Help Fix It, ‘A call to arms to people to get more engaged in politics and to fight back against the wave of populism, polarisation and post-truth’. Campbell is obviously blissfully unaware that he is part of the disease rather than the cure. Populism exists purely because elitists like him believe that they know better than the rest of us, and have been shoving their cock-eyed fantasies down our throats since the turn of the century. Still, the book became a Sunday Times No1 bestseller, which obviously convinced the man who started out his scribbling career as a grubby pornographer that he was up there with the best of them. And now he has picked a quarrel with the most successful writer of our time.

There’s been back and forth on X this week, but it seems increasingly likely at the time of writing that Campbell has retired to lick his wounds. He is humourless, like most dry drunks and all on the ‘progressive’ side (just listen to any Radio 4 ‘comedy’ show), whereas Rowling – who once seemed something of a po-faced swot – has become funnier the more successful she is. An early sign that she was determined to enjoy herself – and hopefully offend haters into the bargain – was when she pictured herself in April last year, drinking a cocktail and smoking a cigar on a yacht with the words, ‘I love it when a plan comes together #SupremeCourt #WomensRights’. She writes a cracking social-media post, too. She responded to the proposed book-burning of her Harry Potter bestsellers with ‘Whenever somebody burns a Potter book the royalties vanish from my bank account – and if the book’s signed, one of my teeth falls out’.

The social-media spat with Campbell is more serious – if one can apply that word to this man. After years of refusing to interact with any of us ‘unkind’ types on the gender-realist team, as is characteristic of people who know that they are doomed to lose any sensible argument, Campbell recently indicated that he and Rory Stewart would be ‘happy’ to welcome JKR to their podcast, The Rest Is Politics, just in case she could use the publicity, one supposes. This was after years of putting misters before sisters in the debate about whether transvestites should be given extra human rights to other men, and of only having transvestite-friendly guests on their show. More in sorrow than in anger (the same way he must have punched that journalist who dared to mock Robert Maxwell, his former employer), he added that ‘previous attempts’ to get her on the pod ‘have been rebuffed’.

A million memes bloomed showing unattractive men pressing their clammy attentions on attractive women who wanted none of it. And then JKR herself landed a sucker-punch: ‘That’s because I wasn’t interested in being used to boost the viewing figures of a pair of exceptionally arrogant men whose understanding of this issue drips with classism and misogyny.’ The three women known as For Women Scotland, who were in London last week marking the anniversary of their legal triumph at the Supreme Court, offered themselves up for a ‘grilling’ on The Rest Is Politics instead. ‘We are still in London’, they said on their X account. ‘He can ask us on the podcast and call us toxic to our faces. If he has the guts.’ Answer came there none. The groom was only interested in non-Transmaids if they brought the spotlight with them.

As an embarrassing addendum to this story, it also came to note this week that Campbell has raised a Groom of the Stool in his own image, when podcast footage emerged of his daughter, Grace, sucking up to a transvestite by calling the FWS gals ‘old’ and ‘ugly’. I say this in a caring way, as Dame Edna would put it, but could it be that poor Grace owns a Magic Mirror? Or is it that she herself looks so much like a bloke in a wig and falsies that she wants a world populated with such men, so she doesn’t feel left out? That she is seriously wanting in judgement is reflected in the way she talks about her ghastly father: ‘I desperately wanted his approval’, she once told the Standard. ‘I was obsessed with him and impressed by him.’

Which brings us back to her dear old dad’s weird would-be spat with JKR. Whatever one thinks of adults reading Harry Potter books (I believe that they should have their voting rights removed, but I understand that I’m an outlier here), there can be no doubt that it’s pointless to take their creator on – she will run rings around you. Which makes me wonder whether some fellows want something… weirder from their interactions with her than to come out on top. (Especially when taking into consideration that she’s also been the subject of weird online stalking this week by another transvestite fan, the lawyer Jolyon Maugham, who claimed a friendship with her which she understandably denied.) It’s a cliché that the kind of men who seek out a damn good thrashing from Miss Whiplash in a Bayswater basement are, in everyday life, arrogant types – judges and the like – but there’s definitely something to it. Do the men who seek to provoke her simply want to be put in their place by her?

I suppose we’ll never know, but one thing is sure: JKR keeps Campbell awake at night, whereas not a minute of her slumber is troubled by him. The words of Diana Vreeland – ‘Elegance is refusal’ – have never been more appropriate than they are when applied to this latest social-media spat between the queen of all she surveys and a man who will – no matter how many times he sells out the Albert Hall ‘faster than the Foo Fighters’ and mouths ‘Rock Star!’ to himself in the mirror of a morning – always have the tell-tale whiff of Groom of the Stool about him.

Julie Burchill is a spiked columnist. Follow her Substack, ‘Notes from the Naughty Step’, here.