Vernon Coleman and The Spectator magazine

I have reported The Spectator to the Press Complaints Commission for publishing an article which is the most pathetic piece of misconceived drivel I've read about me since 1979 when a local paper, now long defunct, published a piece which spelt my name three different ways in the first five paragraphs.

The article in The Spectator was written by Rachel Johnson, sister of Boris Johnson, the editor of The Spectator.

I don't in the slightest mind Boris getting his relatives to knock off bits and pieces for his magazine - a bit of nepotism goes a long way these days - but he should hire someone to check out what they write.

I had my doubts about whether Rachel knew which end of a pen to write with when I spoke to her. She asked me if I could make a living out of writing and seemed a little put out that one of my novels had been made into a movie, but it was when she asked if all the advertisements for my books didn't cut into the profits that I really began to think that Boris ought perhaps to use her for something a little less intellectually demanding - wrapping up copies of The Spectator and sending them out to subscribers for example.

The main errors Rachel made were:

a) Instead of simply asking or looking me up in a reference book she took a wild guess at my age. She didn't even get in the right decade.
b) She claimed that advertisements for my book, Rogue Nation started appearing last month. Actually, they started appearing in April 2003 - eleven months ago.
c) She claimed that Penguin published my early fiction. They didn't. Pan published fiction and non-fiction. Penguin published only non-fiction.
d) She claimed that literary agents Curtis Brown turned down my book, Alice's Diary. Tricky. I left Curtis Brown five years before I wrote Alice's Diary.





Copyright Vernon Coleman 2004





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