You’d think, wouldn’t you, that the Royal Society of Literature (founded 1820) might be one of those institutions that chugs on benignly year in year out with nothing to disturb the peace of its members. But on Thursday morning, a letter in the Times Literary Supplement, got up as I understand it by Jeremy Treglown and signed by 14 more distinguished writers (among them Ian McEwan, Alan Hollinghurst, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown and Fleur Adcock), calls on the leadership of the RSL to refer itself to the Charity Commission. That is, as charitable foundations go, something like demanding that they turn themselves in to the cops.

Everybody is briefing everybody, furious letters are circulating about leaks, and the whole thing is adding to the gaiety of nations

It’s only the latest fusillade in what seems to be something barely short of civil war in this longstanding institution. Many longstanding Fellows of the Society are deeply unhappy with the current management – principally its director, Molly Rosenberg and its chair, the poet Daljit Nagra. Everybody is briefing everybody, furious letters are circulating about leaks, and the whole thing is adding to the gaiety of nations and the public stock of harmless pleasures for popcorn-chewing onlookers, while causing considerable distress to those directly involved.

‘It’s such a clusterfuck! It’s such a clusterfuck! Everyone is falling out with everyone else,’ said one RSL Fellow I spoke to this week, with the characteristic mixture of grief and glee that attends any feud between writers. ‘It’s just unbelievable how much everyone hates each other. It’s like one of those long marriages that seems to have been perfectly happy… and then suddenly you discover they’ve both been seeing other people and have called in the lawyers.’

This rather well captures the multi-dimensional quality of the warfare going on. It’s a slightly tricky row to unpick, as the charge sheet against the present management of the RSL consists of several unrelated (or only marginally related) disgruntlements, but here goes.

The first (and it’s what has kicked off the latest round of sniping, writing of open letters, thinly veiled legal threats and furious behind-the-scenes gossiping) is the suppression of the society’s own journal, the RSL Review, and the alleged summary firing of its editor Maggie Fergusson. I should say, incidentally, that Maggie is a friend of, and frequent contributor to, the books pages of The Spectator. The RSL Review was in final proof, just before Christmas, when the RSL’s director Molly Rosenberg apparently took exception to an article in it about writers in Palestine. The whole magazine was summarily pulled from publication and the editor (a three-decade servant of the RSL and a former director herself) was hoofed out.

The RSL’s version is that the magazine’s publication has merely been ‘postponed’ for editorial improvements, that Maggie Fergusson departed by mutual agreement, that she had always known that this would be the last issue she edited (both of which claims Fergusson flatly denies), and that all contributors to the postponed magazine have been kept informed as to the fates of their contributions. Far be it from me to call this a pack of lies. But it does seem that, using the unimprovable formula of the late Queen, ‘Some recollections may vary.’ At any rate, the signatories of the letter to the TLS clearly feel on firm ground saying: ‘The issues to be investigated would have to include the censorship attempt, which we are quite sure occurred and which plainly contravened fundamental literary values.’

The second issue, which strikes that one slightly slant, is to do with a change in the way that Fellows of the society are elected. The laws of the society have it that candidates must have at least two works of ‘outstanding literary merit’ to their name, be proposed and seconded by existing Fellows, and approved by the Council. In the interests of diversifying the membership – which does skew whiter and older than the population at large – and making the RSL an institution ‘for all writers’ (as its president Bernardine Evaristo has put it) some new methods of election have been put in place. Evaristo wrote in this week’s Guardian that in ‘some schemes, members of the public sometimes get the chance to nominate writers who might otherwise be overlooked because they are outside the elite London literary networks’.

There will be those who frame this as a woke-youngsters-versus-traditionalists ding-dong, in which a doddery and snobbish old guard seeks to defend the citadel of their white privilege from the younger, browner writers hitherto denied their due by the literary establishment. I don’t presume to take a view on how the RSL manages its affairs. It also seems fair to Bernardine to make clear that her role in the RSL is ceremonial, so she is not the prime mover behind the controversial changes. (If this was all about a ‘woke agenda’, incidentally, it’s surprising that the piece alleged to have been censored was one sympathetic to the Palestinian side in the conflict.)

I restrict myself to a couple of observations. One is that the idea of the RSL being ‘for all writers’ is questionable: as one person I spoke to pointed out, we already have an organisation for all writers, and it’s called the Society of Authors. The RSL is supposed to be an organisation for really good writers. Which is as much as to say that being involved with ‘elite… literary networks’ is sort of the point. And if the guiding principle is to have two works of ‘outstanding literary merit’ in print, you would expect it to skew a bit older. Many, perhaps most, writers go a whole career without getting even one ‘OLM’; you can expect the majority to take a decade or two to get two written. It’s not like football, where if you haven’t done it by 23 you’re finished: the longer you go at it, in general, the better you get.

On race, there is, no doubt, a pipeline problem here, too. If the publishing establishment has been reluctant until relatively recently to give writers of colour a fair shake (which I think you’d be a fool to dispute), the pool of candidates for Fellowship at this point will on average be whiter than maybe you’d like. There will be fewer writers of colour mid-career and with a belt full of OLMs, because 20 years ago fewer writers of colour were getting the chance to begin a career. You can take the view that this is a problem that time will solve – the fruits of today’s determination across the industry to platform diverse voices will be filtering through in the next decade or two – or you can put your thumb on the scales.

The third and final strand in the current row is the question of whether, and how, the RSL is to take a view on supporting writers’ freedoms and freedom of expression in general. Many Fellows were distinctly dismayed when a motion in Council to speak out in support of Salman Rushdie after an Islamist lunatic attempted to murder him was squashed. The reasoning, according to Evaristo, is that the RSL should remain ‘impartial’ in political matters. Let us say of this only that several writers, including Sir Salman himself, were not super impressed by this stance.

What unites these disparate threads seems to be a reluctance by the senior management to engage directly with the membership they ostensibly serve. ‘They’re treating us like enemies, rather than like colleagues,’ one Fellow told me. Complaints, queries, requests for explanations have, according to more than one Fellow I’ve spoken to, gone unanswered or been bureaucratically stonewalled. If Daljit Nagra does decide to bring the Charity Commission in (an option he seems to have at least countenanced in conversation with Treglown) that will at least be a step in the direction of clearing the air.