Harry potter

Harry Potter returned to Hogwarts this weekend for a 20th anniversary special. He was joined in the Gryffindor common room by Hermione Granger and Ron Weasley, but not – controversially – the woman who created it all. JK Rowling’s conception of Hogwarts, a school of witchcraft and wizardry, has become an institution. The books have sold more than 500 million copies worldwide, while the film series grossed almost $10 billion at the box office. Not a bad return for Warner Brothers, who bought the rights to the first four books for a reported £1 million. But Rowling’s foray into the trans debate has created a headache for Warner Brothers. Let’s be clear: she has said nothing that diminishes transgender people like me.

It is often said that J.K. Rowling is uncancellable. So rich and bankable is the Harry Potter author — now a modern-day folk devil due to her views on transgenderism — it is almost inconceivable that she could be deprived of her livelihood or pushed entirely out of polite society. But her deranged haters are certainly giving it a good go. The demonisation of Rowling has taken a decidedly Stalinist turn of late. Her crime? Making some mild criticisms of gender ideology and holding to deeply old-fashioned views like believing in biological sex. The cultural elite might not be able to deprive Rowling of her income, but they can try to erase her name from the very work she has created.

Harry Potter is a fictional orphan locked in a cupboard by his aunt and uncle, after which he discovers a magical world and a better class of nemesis than his ugly suburban relatives. It seethes with class. The Dursleys are lower-middle-class, golf-club-haunting gammons. I suspect their MP is Dominic Raab, and I suspect they vote for him. The improved nemesis ‘Lord’ Voldemort is half landed gentry and heir to a Jacobean manor house on a hill. Harry Potter is world famous, and so people want to join him in suburban misery (we are near Watford), though in a slightly larger cupboard: the vast prop room in a former sound stage off the M1 called the Warner Bros Studio Tour London — the Making of Harry Potter. Harry is a boiler-plated mythical hero.

I had my first doubts about Lord Hall, the former director-general of the BBC, when he addressed a group of us BBC editors back in about 1999 in his role then as head of news. A pleasant, emollient man, he revealed that he was thoroughly enjoying reading the second Harry Potter book, which had recently been published. Grow up, Tony, I thought to myself. Get yourself some Dostoyevsky for Christ’s sake. Snobbish it well may be, but I can’t take seriously an adult displaying such infantile predilections (and this goes for those grown-up admirers of Philip Pullman). Harry Potter was a big sensation at the time.

On the face of it, there is nothing complicated about the politics of Harry Potter, who made his first appearance in The Philosopher’s Stone 20 years ago. Like his creator J.K. Rowling, who once gave £1 million to the Labour party, he is a left-wing paternalist in the Bloomsbury tradition — the love child of John Maynard Keynes and Virginia Woolf. He feels a protective duty towards the common man (‘muggles’ in the lexicon of the novels) and a loathing for suburban, lower-middle-class Tories like the Dursleys, his Daily Mail-reading foster parents. The arch-villain of the saga is Voldemort, a charismatic Übermensch who believes in purity and strength and in the final novel promotes his own version of the Nuremberg Laws through the Ministry of Magic.