Forget Moriarty or Captain Hook — the most popular villain in literature could soon be Justice Secretary Chris Grayling.
The Londoner is delighted to see that Kathy Lette’s campaign to bring poetic justice raining down on the head of the Tory MP is picking up steam. Back in the spring the comic novelist told us that a “Christopher Grayling” had just become the name of the charmless (and ultimately imprisoned) antagonist in her upcoming novel Courting Trouble — Lette’s creative method for enacting a literary revenge on the Justice Secretary after he introduced a ban on sending books to inmates.
Now the New York Times is reporting that writer Margaret Drabble is threatening to join Lette’s rename-and-shame brigade, while over here the MP is in danger of inspiring villainous works of fiction from luminaries such as David Hare and Carol-Ann Duffy, who have staged protest readings outside jails.
“Grayling says books are a privilege whereas I think of them as a staple, like bread and water,” Lette tells us now. “As I’m of convict stock,” the Australian writer adds, “and as I left school at 16, this ban on books for prisoners really irks me. Inmates should be rewarded for reading. I mean, what a captive audience!”
The writers’ plan to “impale Grayling on the end of our pens” could soon be seen on TV — Lette has had offers to adapt her novel into a series. “Soon an evil character called Chris Grayling will be looming large on our TV screens,” laughs Lette. “Poetic justice! The only true justice in the world.”
