British Elections

J.K. Rowling Rips David Cameron

Says he lacks sympathy for the poor.

As Britain prepares for its first American-style televised debate, the Tory candidate David Cameron will have to soldier on without the support of his country’s most famous woman. Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling laments the period between 1993 and 1997, when she was a single parent and therefore, automatically, “a bogeyman of the Tory government.” She says that the Conservative Party has changed little since then, with Cameron now leading “a renewed marginalization of the single, the divorced, and the widowed.” Rowling, who is richer than the Queen, recalls a time when her accountant suggested she move to Ireland or Monaco to protect her fortune from taxation. She chose not to, she says, because “I am indebted to the British welfare state; the very one that Mr. Cameron would like to replace with charity handouts. When my life hit rock bottom, that safety net, threadbare though it had become under John Major’s Government, was there to break the fall. I cannot help feeling, therefore, that it would have been contemptible to scarper for the West Indies at the first sniff of a seven-figure royalty check. This, if you like, is my notion of patriotism.”