By Sarah Vine
Whisper it, but part of me feels rather sorry for Emma Watson, who this week suffered a deft and deadly evisceration at the hands of her erstwhile friend, JK Rowling.
Watson told an interviewer she still 'loves' Rowling, and doesn't want her cancelled - despite their differing opinions on the issue of gender identity. And the Harry Potter author posted a blistering response on X.
After years of sustained provocation and childish bleating about rainbows and unicorns from Watson (and her Harry Potter co-stars), Rowling finally let rip, to devastating effect.
The level of controlled but palpable rage was truly terrifying. 'She'll [Watson] never need a homeless shelter,' Rowling wrote. 'She's never going to be placed on a mixed-sex public hospital ward. I'd be astounded if she's been in a High Street changing room since childhood.'
She continued: 'Her public bathroom is single occupancy and comes with a security man standing guard outside the door. Has she had to strip off in a newly mixed-sex changing room at a council-run swimming pool?
'Is she ever likely to need a state-run rape crisis centre that refuses to guarantee an all-female service? To find herself sharing a prison cell with a male rapist who's identified into the women's prison?
'I wasn't a multi-millionaire at 14,' she added. 'I lived in poverty while writing the book that made Emma famous. I therefore understand from my own life experience what the trashing of women's rights in which Emma has so enthusiastically participated means to women and girls without her privileges.'
Devastating, you'll agree. And fair enough: Rowling is completely within her rights to be so angry. I would be - especially if the person in question had not only turned her back on me after I had given her so much, but also dared to patronise me by sending me a mealy-mouthed little note of apology following a very pointed and public attack.
For someone who operates so self-consciously under the 'be kind' banner, Watson's reference to 'witches' at the 2022 BAFTAs (widely interpreted as a dig at Rowling) was a real kick in the teeth, a deliberate playing to the gallery. The audience of luvvies clapped and whooped - at a time when the hysteria around this issue was at its height.
As Rowling writes: 'Emma asked someone to pass on a handwritten note from her to me, which contained the single sentence: "I'm so sorry for what you're going through" (she has my phone number).
'This was back when the death, rape and torture threats against me were at their peak, at a time when my personal security measures had had to be tightened considerably and I was constantly worried for my family's safety.
'Emma had just publicly poured more petrol on the flames.'
What kind of a person attacks someone in public - but then apologises to them in private?
But then this whole sorry saga is emblematic of the moral vacuum and utter madness surrounding this issue, and the way that the extreme trans lobby, together with other fanatical groups have managed to capture useful idiots like Watson and turn their ignorance and lack of moral backbone to their advantage.
Even so, like I said, I can't entirely condemn Watson. It's not completely her fault that she's this way. She has been famous since she was nine. Like most child stars, she grew up in a blinding spotlight and has never experienced anything approximating a normal existence.
She probably never skipped school with her mates, or dyed her hair a dodgy shade of pink, or gave herself an inappropriate piercing, or any of the silly, normal things teenagers do growing up.
She played that one character, the prissy Hermione, for more than ten years, so long that she almost forgot to develop her own personality. Meanwhile, everyone around her treated her like a china doll because she was 'the talent'.
Sure, she has plenty of money, sure she leads a materially charmed life - but psychologically and emotionally, that kind of pressure is extremely wearing.
No wonder she struggles with 'pretty basic life things': she has only ever really existed on screen.
In the real world, for all her expensive education, she's as flimsy as a passing breeze.
Of course, none of that justifies her thoroughly toxic behaviour towards Rowling, who made her who she is today. But maybe it goes some way towards explaining it.
As Rowling herself pointed out in her post, Watson 'has so little experience of real life she's ignorant of how ignorant she is'.
Watson may be an extreme example; but among her generation of millennials this trait is not uncommon.
So many women of Watson's age (she's 35) seem to have this raging sense of superiority, entitlement and even righteousness - even though they've no real justification for any of it.
I found myself in conversation with one such type the other day, at a lunch. She was trying to persuade me that October 7 was just a stunt. When I asked her how she could in all conscience dismiss the rape, torture and mutilation of hundreds of young women - women like her, educated and free - in that way, she just rolled her eyes.
It was like I was just boring her with the facts, in the same way that Rowling has been all these years with her tiresome insistence that perhaps allowing men to self-identify as women and allowing them access to femaleonly spaces might pose a threat.
This woman didn't want to hear what I had to say because it didn't fit her narrative. It was easier to just shut me down than debate, and risk having her preconceptions challenged or losing the argument.
And this is what we have increasingly seen reflected across schools and university campuses, at festivals and protest marches. A reluctance or inability to think independently, a desire or urge to be part of a mob, an unthinking, amorphous mass.
That's what a mind infected by ideology is: closed and in denial, unwilling to contemplate the other side's view. Not because it doesn't have merit, but because it represents an inconvenient, uncomfortable or sometimes merely unfashionable truth.
Watson vs Rowling is more than just a clash of two celebrities. It represents the biggest battle of our time, the toxic, divisive culture wars that have raged for nearly two decades now, spanning all kinds of issues.
Watson's generation have grown up with the threat of cancellation, which is why they are so weak and so easily led.
Very few have the courage - and, in Rowling's case, the bottomless financial resources - to swim against the tide. They've seen what happens to those who do. Such as the late Charlie Kirk, who paid the ultimate price.
And so, like Watson, they take the path of least resistance. They indulge in personal populism. They cheer on pop stars such as Bob 'death to the IDF' Vylan and Kneecap, who dress as terrorists and urge their fans to kill their MP. They think this makes them 'stunning and brave'. It doesn't. It just makes them mindless sheep.
The real rebels are brave people like Rowling who don't succumb to mob mentality, who keep arguing their case, calmly and cogently, even in the face of violence and vitriol.
That's what Rowling and others such as the women's rights campaigner Graham Linehan have done, to their immense detriment - but it has paid off.
Thanks to them, future generations of vulnerable women will be safe - and many young people who might otherwise have disappeared down the rabbit hole of trans ideology will now not.
