Mick Hartley

Julie Burchill in the Spectator has fun with Stephen Fry:

I’d wager that all of J.K.R.’s famous critics envy her money – no one is as greedy as the rich – but even more than that, as they crouch atop their relatively modest fortunes like resentful dung beetles, they envy her the ease, the generosity and yes, the nobility which has seen her go from billionaire to a mere multi-millionaire, like them. One gets the impression that whereas J.K.R. has the psychological bandwidth – which probably comes from real confidence in her own creativity – to dispense with vast amounts of cash, there is a bottomless pit of neediness inside her critics which leads them to grab at, say, advertising campaigns the way they do.

They certainly don’t need the money. But when, like [Daniel] Radcliffe (thought to have around £100 million) and co., you know that you really are nothing special and were just tremendously lucky, it’s bound to make you feel insecure, no matter how much you’ve got in the bank. Look at the vast amount of voiceover work (like his female equivalent, Dawn French) Fry has done – that can only be greed. Surely there’s only so many video games his lovely young husband can play with?

Cross-dressing men in general want to be Rowling, as they tend to look like navvies done up as prossies, whereas J.K.R. is wonderfully elegant with her wand-like body and Modigliani face and clever way with a big hat and a lovely bit of scarlet lippy – the brazen hussy! But we inevitably come back to Fry as the bellwether (not to mention the bell-end) of J.K.R.-envy. I once, some time ago, labelled him ‘a stupid person’s idea of a clever person’ – but the degradation of his intellectual ability in the years which have passed since then has been a remarkable, Biden-level catastrophe for his thought processes. So more than anything else, he envies Rowling because she is that rare thing in a po-faced world; she is a wit. And it’s been a damn long time since Fry – his once-glittering brain eaten alive by becoming the genital equivalent of a Flat Earther – was one of those. The poor poppet!

Ouch.