Lord Bell has condemned Mantel’s The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher and called for the police to investigate. But exactly what crime has been committed here?
Hilary Mantel is waiting for the soft-knock of Scotland Yard. Where her watch ticks steadily her wrist itches in anticipation of handcuffs. She is perhaps enjoying a final cup of tea before being taken into custody. Why? Because she made something up – she wrote a story and it upset some very important people.
The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher took Mantel 30 years to write and was inspired by a real event – she spotted an unguarded Thatcher from her bedroom window in Windsor and, passingly, thought: “If I wasn’t me, if I was someone else, she’d be dead.” In her story she imagines she is two someone elses – an IRA hit man and a seemingly ordinary woman with a fatally good view. These unlikely allies conspire to kill the prime minister. The writer succeeds where terrorists failed.
“If somebody admits they want to assassinate somebody, surely the police should investigate,” Lord Timothy Bell, a friend and former PR adviser to Thatcher, told the Sunday Times. “This is in unquestionably bad taste.”
Let us deal first with taste. This man’s client-list presently glitters with Rolf Harris and Cuadrilla, the UK fracking company. He has previously managed the reputations of General Pinochet and Asma al-Assad, wife of the Syrian president. “I’m not concerned with taste,” said Mantel in my interview with her. Apparently neither is Lord Bell.
More
The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher took Mantel 30 years to write and was inspired by a real event – she spotted an unguarded Thatcher from her bedroom window in Windsor and, passingly, thought: “If I wasn’t me, if I was someone else, she’d be dead.” In her story she imagines she is two someone elses – an IRA hit man and a seemingly ordinary woman with a fatally good view. These unlikely allies conspire to kill the prime minister. The writer succeeds where terrorists failed.
“If somebody admits they want to assassinate somebody, surely the police should investigate,” Lord Timothy Bell, a friend and former PR adviser to Thatcher, told the Sunday Times. “This is in unquestionably bad taste.”
Let us deal first with taste. This man’s client-list presently glitters with Rolf Harris and Cuadrilla, the UK fracking company. He has previously managed the reputations of General Pinochet and Asma al-Assad, wife of the Syrian president. “I’m not concerned with taste,” said Mantel in my interview with her. Apparently neither is Lord Bell.
More
No comments:
Post a Comment