Is Sally Rooney a folk hero? The British media seems determined to turn her into one. It makes sense on one level. She has already been seen with an owl. Maybe someone should check if the beautiful bird from that photograph of the writer is also a “supporter of terror” under UK law. You can never be too sure.
It has been quite the week for a genre of reporting I would dearly like to call speculative fiction but can’t. That’s because it’s unclear which is the more absurd: the actual ramifications of Downing Street’s move to proscribe Palestine Action or the excitable reaction to Rooney’s reiteration of her support for it.
Certainly, the authoritarian and counterproductive proscription of the direct-action group by Keir Starmer’s government is deeply serious, while many of the Rooney headlines are not. The coverage has a tone I can only describe as keen, almost as if the UK press were willing the novelist to be arrested.
I offer this scenario: Rooney lands at the Queen’s Terminal and switches on her phone. Somewhere between the runway and Heathrow’s bag-spurting carousels she fires up a payments app and hits send. At arrivals she’s detained by counterterrorism police on a 24-hour airport stakeout until the Intermezzo author is no longer at large.
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It’s ludicrous – at least, I hope it is – but it’s also not too far from one hypothetical outlined in the Sunday Telegraph, which, in a nice moment of literary specificity, imagined Rooney flying into Heathrow and proceeding to donate money to Palestine Action. If this were to happen she should be fined, its columnist insisted, and the money “used to fund the British armed forces”.
This step-by-step outline only followed the acknowledgment that she “resides in the Republic of Ireland, not the UK, and is an Irish national”. Let’s just say this technicality – this tiny hiccup – wasn’t equally prominent everywhere.
Rooney’s comment piece in The Irish Times, in which she pledged to use the proceeds of her work “to go on supporting Palestine Action and direct action against genocide in whatever way I can”, led to a spate of headlines in which the word “could” did heavy lifting.
“Sally Rooney could be arrested under Terrorism Act after pledging royalties to Palestine Action,” read the Guardian’s, before the newspaper explained that this could happen if she restated her position at a UK literary festival.
But you can’t get an “if” into a headline, apparently – and, look, if people confused about her nationality and residency were left thinking an arrest was imminent, with Rooney about to join Liam Óg Ó hAnnaidh of Kneecap at Westminster magistrates’ court in an Irish two-for-one, that’s on them for scrolling by.
In fairness to the Guardian, it explored the potential fallout from Rooney’s words for the same reason she wrote them: to highlight the wrongness of the UK government’s path, or what one legal expert it quoted termed the “gross disproportionality” of it all.
Elsewhere Rooney attracted eager takedowns thanks to her status as a millennial novelist, a self-identified Marxist, a successful young woman and, most outrageously, someone who earns residual fees from the BBC.
No, please, do tell us what you think of her books. Thought this was about Wayne because you had never heard of Sally? I believe you. The BBC is “under pressure” now? Naturally.
As for suggestions that Downing Street directly “warned” Rooney, there was a slight narrative leap there. Starmer’s official spokesman declined to comment on her remarks. Then, when prompted, he provided a more general reminder that support for proscribed organisations is a terror offence.
So if it winds up looking like No 10 is taking time out to scold the author of Conversations with Friends in a week when Israel expanded and intensified its assault on Gaza, it’s a case of hapless communications, wildly skewed priorities, or both.
I’m going with both. The good news for this zero-tolerance UK government was that another lawyer quoted by the Telegraph thought Rooney wouldn’t have to do or say anything after landing at Heathrow, as the “extra-jurisdiction reach” of anti-terror law would allow authorities to arrest her the minute she entered the country.
You just think, wait, aren’t you busy dragging placard-carrying grandmothers into the back of police vans? Have you run out of genocide-opposing British poets to arrest? What about that guy nicked for wearing a T-shirt branded Plasticine Action? Are you sure his brazen support for Morph, of animated-clay fame, wasn’t a crime? I suppose it’s best to storm the literary-festival marquees and seize all the totes just in case.
After the arrest of 532 people at a peaceful London protest on August 9th, the big date is now September 6th, when another is planned. Expect brave Rooneyites to be well represented. They know, as she does, that none of this is normal and all of it is profound.
