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.
And, of course, the Harry Potter franchise does not stop at books. There are wildly successful films, plays, a theme park, shops and merchandise. All of which means that last year, Rowling personally paid £47.5 million in taxes. Meanwhile, the industry around her work drives tourism, creates job opportunities and generates millions more for the national coffers.
On top of paying taxes that others might seek to avoid, Rowling is a huge philanthropist. Her Lumos Foundation is an international charity dedicated to helping children in need receive care in families rather than institutions. In her native Scotland, Rowling has established Beira’s Place, a centre offering support and counselling for women who have experienced sexual assault. Again, we know that advocating for women who have been victims of rape or sexual assault is also a cause close to the Queen’s heart.
Yet a single photo of Rowling and Camilla meeting at the Palace of Holyrood is front-page news, precisely because the author is neither a regular at Buckingham Palace nor a frequent visitor to Downing Street. To our national shame, rather than being celebrated, Rowling is all too often overlooked or shunned. Numerous schools have, over the years, renamed or dropped plans to name houses after the writer. Actors like Emma Watson and Daniel Radcliffe, who, as children, appeared in the Harry Potter films, have sought to distance themselves from her work. And this is before we get to online abuse Rowling has received. ‘Enough death threats to paper my house’, she said at one point.
We all know why Rowling isn’t celebrated. We’re back to those men in dresses again. Transgender activists, people so convinced that being a woman is a mere identity, rather than a biological reality, and so determined to ensure that burly men have access to women’s changing rooms, prisons, hospital wards and even rape crisis centres, put a target on her back the moment she came out in defence of women’s sex-based rights. Ever since, there has been a cordon sanitaire around Rowling. And so the status and honours that should rightfully be hers for the taking are rarely forthcoming.
So all kudos to Camilla for breaching the omerta around Rowling. Of course, there has been a backlash to their meeting. Transgender activists have taken to social media to express their ‘disappointment’ at the pair getting along, labelling it ‘tone deaf’ and ‘deplorable’. To add insult to their perceived injury, this was still (just about) the holy month of Pride, making the picture of the two together ‘quite the statement’ according to one shocked critic. Most bizarrely of all, photos of Princess Diana began circulating on X, the subtext being that she remains ‘the real queen’, or something like that.
The critics can gripe all they like. On Terf island, as trans-activists have nicknamed this glorious bastion of women’s rights and common sense, they are firmly on the losing side. And I am convinced that neither Queen Camilla nor Queen Rowling (as she will always be to me) gives a single hoot what anyone thinks about who they meet. They were no doubt having far too much fun. Camilla, if you’re reading this, how about opening up Buckingham Palace to all the feisty feminists out there? Now that would be quite the statement.
