Though I’m very old, I’m not quite old enough to remember the BBC radio comedy ITMA, or It’s That Man Again, which amused our happy breed during the war years as we fought the fascist hordes. But I’ve heard the occasional repeat, and have been struck by the presence of a character called Mona Lott (Mona Little, after her marriage), the lugubrious laundress whose catchphrase was “It’s being so cheerful that keeps me going.”

I can’t help thinking of Ms Lott whenever I see a photograph of the novelist Sally Rooney. I know that few things are as annoying as being told to “Cheer up, love”, but her look of ceaseless sorrow — tinged with perhaps a pinch of pensive petulance — has led me over the years to feel an irresistible desire to react thus. And the more successful she has become, the crosser and sadder she has seemed.

Now, Rooney is cross and sad about not being able to publish new work in the UK because of her support of the proscribed group Palestine Action. In a witness statement to the High Court, the Irish author — a keen supporter of the anti-Israel activist organisation — said the Government’s ban means she cannot be paid royalties by her British publisher or the BBC because it could leave both at risk of being accused of funding terrorism. Back in 2021 she refused to sell Hebrew translation rights for one of her novels to an Israeli publishing house. In August, she said she intended to use her royalties “to go on supporting Palestine Action”.

It’s no surprise that adults living in great ease and comfort should want to experience the thrill of being a wannabe freedom fighter, just as they want to experience fake tattoos as children. But the serious question concerns why the state is aiding and abetting her. This silly cultural sideshow highlights how counterproductive the Palestine Action ban has been, allowing as it does Rooney to pose as a martyr to censorship.

In this piece of performative virtue-signalling, it’s like the British legal system is her cornerman in one of those old boxing melodramas, giving her a bit of orange to suck on and urging: “Go on champ, you can do it! Knock the running dogs of capitalism out for the count!” In order to deny her royalties, a court would surely have to prove that she wasn’t receiving money from anywhere else and that she was spending literally all her money on Palestine Action. This is unlikely to be the case, considering that Rooney has a net worth around £10 million, a good deal of this arising from the fact that her books are massive sellers in that bastion of human freedom and dignity, China.

It’s understandable that a soppy writer should feel inferior to those who took on the genuine fascists. But all the posturing in the world will not make her a warrior, nor any more than a lugubrious laundress with dubious attitudes towards the world’s only Jewish state. We should let Rooney show her true colours, rather than helping drape her in the robes of fake liberation and urging her out into the ring once more. Unless, of course, we decide to go along with her greatly inflated view of herself, smite our collective brow with our collective fist, and realise that a life without Sally Rooney book signings is no life at all.

---

Julie Burchill is a journalist, playwright and author of Welcome to the Woke Trials, available now. Her latest play, Awful People, co-written with Daniel Raven, comes to Brighton Pier in September 2023.

BoozeAndFagz

---