The Harry Potter stars don’t deserve JK Rowling’s pardon

Well done to JK Rowling for her implacable stance when it comes to those who have wronged her. The author has said she will never forgive the performers who shot to fame thanks to their starring roles in the Harry Potter film franchise then disowned and effectively vilified her for not subscribing to transgender extremism.

Writing on X in the wake of the Cass review, which condemned the way young people had been encouraged to undergo drastic treatment on the weakest of evidence, Rowling described it as a “watershed” moment that “lays bare the tragedy” of allowing children to transition.

When someone then tweeted that actors Daniel Radcliffe and Emma Watson owed her “a very public apology... safe in the knowledge that you will forgive them”, Rowling responded by saying, with magnificent understatement: “Not safe, I’m afraid.” She continued: “Celebs who cosied up to a movement intent on eroding women’s hard-won rights and who used their platforms to cheer on the transitioning of minors can save their apologies for traumatised detransitioners and vulnerable women reliant on single-sex spaces.”

I can’t see that happening anytime soon. Frankly, if I knew how to cancel someone, I’d cancel everyone who believes you can assert any old nonsense about sex and gender, no matter how preposterous.

As Rowling has demonstrated with great dignity, you can’t victimise someone who has the backing of every right-thinking person on the planet. And you certainly can’t bully someone who is prepared to put her money where other people’s mouths are and challenge Scotland’s laughable new hate law, which was only introduced to curry favour with self-righteous teenagers so they will vote to leave the union once Indyref2 rears its ugly head.

Sometimes sorry just isn’t enough. In my book, forgiveness is not always a corollary. It’s fine to accept an apology but that is not the same as forgiving or forgetting. There is no obligation to do either.

Bearing a grudge is supposed to be corrosive and generally gets a bad rap but nobody ever talks about the pleasure it can bring as you plan how to settle old scores.

Of course, the prevailing consensus is that forgiveness is all to do with love and by forgiving you set yourself free, but I think that is more about wars, invasions, criminality and so forth.

My grudges are invariably petty. Minor betrayals; the noisy neighbour who reported me to the police; that time a colleague said “I thought you weren’t allowed to wear short skirts after the age of 30”. Like a lot of people, I can only forgive if I forget. When abuse hurled at decent people is preserved online for posterity, how can anyone even begin to heal?