Hilary Mantel: I’m ashamed of Britain, so I’m off to Ireland
Wolf Hall author attacks monarchy and says she may ‘breathe easier in a republic’
WOLF HALL author Dame Hilary Mantel has sparked anger after declaring that she is ‘ashamed’ of Britain and plans to take up Irish citizenship to ‘become a European again’.
The Booker Prize winner also used an interview with the Italian newspaper La Repubblica to describe Boris Johnson as unfit for public office, to criticise the institution of monarchy and to ridicule the UK as an ‘artificial and precarious construct’.
But her broadside – and assertion that she might be happier living in a republic – could leave her vulnerable to allegations of hypocrisy for agreeing to become a Dame of the British Empire in 2014.
‘The popularity of monarchy as an institution is something that baffles me,’ she told La Repubblica. ‘I don’t want to think that people are naturally slavish, and actually enjoy inequality…
‘I might breathe easier in a republic and may be able to arrange it. I hope to loop back into my family story and become an Irish citizen.’
She added: ‘Our projected move has been held back by Covid, but as much as I love where I live now in the West Country, by the sea, I feel the need to be packing my bags and to become a European again.’
Dame Hilary, 69, said she had always been conscious of belonging to an Irish family even though both her parents were English.
‘My parents were both born in England but the generation that shaped me was the one before that, and I was conscious of belonging to an Irish family,’ she said. ‘We were northern, working-class and Catholic, and to me, Englishness was Protestant and southern, and owned by people with more money.’
She went on to dismiss the UK as ‘an artificial and precarious construct’, adding: ‘It’s not holy, and it’s not even old. As a child, I learned nothing about the history of other parts of these islands.’
The author criticised both Mr Johnson and the public’s failure to be more welcoming to refugees trying to enter the country, saying: ‘I agree he [Mr Johnson] is a complex personality, but this much is simple – he should not be in public life. And I am sure he knows it.
‘We see the ugly face of contemporary Britain in the people on the beaches abusing exhausted refugees even as they scramble to the shore. It makes one ashamed.
‘And ashamed… to be living in the nation that elected this Government and allows itself to be led by it.’
Last night, Jeremy Black, emeritus professor of history at Exeter University, said: ‘With these remarks,
Dame Hilary shows herself to be silly and very conceited. For somebody who has written on history, she shows a very partisan account of Britain’s past and it is one that is fundamentally misleading.’
In 2013, Dame Hilary provoked uproar when she described the Duchess of Cambridge as a ‘shop window mannequin with no personality of her own’.
A year later, she was criticised when she published a story imagining the assassination of Margaret Thatcher at the hands of the IRA.
Last night, Dame Hilary told The Mail on Sunday: ‘I don’t think I have anything to add [to the interview] except that the question I answered for the Italian paper – and I do try to answer the question – was an abstract question about monarchy as an institution; it was not even about the British monarchy.
‘I have made no criticism of or comment on members of the Royal Family. I have nothing but respect for individuals trying to fulfil their role in the face of an often unhelpful media.’