An open letter to the friend who dropped me after Question Time

I’ve put off sending a private email that’s been ready to go for weeks. Then last Sunday, I read Julie Burchill’s column in the Telegraph about the rigid ideological conformism amidst today’s purportedly ‘creative’ class, and it hit a nerve. Despite our sanctification of inclusivity and diversity, Burchill wrote, ‘exclusivity and groupthink still control the arts’. Because my own small experience of failing the progressive purity test this winter has been repeated up and down this country, it is not   small.

Scaled up, the private becomes the public. So I’m finally sending my email as an open letter, allowing the Spectator readership in on a conversation germane to more than my social life. Think of this column as legal hacking.

In December, a good friend and fellow novelist emailed (ringing up like a human being would have been too scary) that my appearance on Question Time three days before was so ‘painful’ that this person was ‘stepping back’ from our friendship — and we all know what that means. Although I no longer owe the left-leaning author any fealty, I withhold my colleague’s identity from a sense of decorum. My full reply:

For all I know, X, we’ll never speak to each other again. So maybe you could at least hear me out. We’ve been friends for 13 years.

You claim we have different ‘values’, which on the left means only one thing: I’m a bigot. You’ve little evidence for that. On QT, I objected that Boris’s careless ‘letterbox’ simile was simply not that insulting; I didn’t write the offending line myself. I thought the issue worth confronting because this tossed off aside comparing veiled women to a minor aspect of domestic architecture was deployed throughout the general election campaign to prove that the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom is a racist and his entire party is endemically racist, too.