Surviving James Bond

Anthony Horowitz has emerged from his first Twitter storm shaken but intact, says Cole Moreton in The Mail on Sunday. It began in 2015, when the bestselling novelist – who’d just been commissioned to write a new James Bond story – was asked whether he thought the black British actor Idris Elba would make a good 007. He replied: “For me, Idris Elba is a bit too rough to play the part. It’s not a colour issue. I think he is probably a bit too ‘street’ for Bond.” Although Horowitz went on to name other black actors he felt would be a good fit, the quote was taken as evidence of coded racism, and Twitter erupted in self-righteous fury. “A Twitter storm is like an oil slick,” Horowitz says now. “When it hits you, it’s disgusting and you can’t breathe and everything is covered in s***. But then, like all oil slicks, nature takes over and it recedes.”

The experience has changed him, however. “I’m now much more guarded, more careful, more discreet. It’s just a shame, isn’t it?” In this age of heightened sensitivities, he says, you have to be careful about what you say – even in fiction. Horowitz had been planning to write a teen novel featuring a black character, but was warned off by an editor. “There is a chain of thought in America that it is inappropriate for white writers to try to create black characters. That it is not our experience, and therefore to do so is by its very nature artificial and possibly patronising.” He ponders the implications. “Taking it to its logical extreme, all my characters will from now on be 62-year-old white Jewish men living in London!”