Readers of The Spectator may remember the 2021 defenestration of author and teacher Kate Clanchy, which saw her part company with her publisher Pan Macmillan. This was after whole extracts of her award-winning book Some Children I Taught and What They Taught Me were slated for rewriting, more or less at the behest of a Twitter mob.

Clanchy, in her book, had described one student’s ‘almond eyes’, another’s ‘chocolate skin’ and a third’s ‘fine Ashkenazi nose’. For this she was viciously lambasted by three fellow writers and – barely believably – compared by one of them to Nazi eugenicists. Recalling the episode soon afterwards, Clanchy, who lost both parents that same year, wrote in Prospect of the suicidal feelings that followed: ‘in the bathroom, telling me to reach for the razor blade; by the side of the road, telling me to walk into the traffic; in the river while I was swimming…’ To UnHerd, she said simply, ‘This is my actual life’s work – everything that I’ve always worked for, it has actually been taken away. It really does happen.’

Now, in the past few days, we’ve seen another writer attacked on X and in the press – for what some might feel are more obvious cultural crimes. The David Lammy advisor Ben Judah, author of works like This is Europe: The Way We Live Now and Fragile Empire (about Russia), has got himself into hot water for comments made in his book This is London: Life and Death in the World City, published in January 2016.

In a damning article on the Londoner news site, Judah has been slammed for, among other things, his highly racialised portrayals of some of London’s immigrants. He describes one Caribbean person he encounters as looking ‘pure African, flabby more than muscled, with a fold of skin at the back of his melon head’, and another character as being ‘skinny, a little brittle, with an oblong Somali head that slopes down into thick lips, charred from weed and khat’.

Giving other examples, the authors of the piece, Joshi Herrmann and Andrew Kersley, describe Judah’s book as ‘a disturbing picture of the capital, littered with racial stereotypes and falsehoods’. Yet This is London was feted at the time – ‘important… impressive’ (The Telegraph); ‘Mesmerising… deeply compassionate’ (The Bookseller); ‘Ben Judah grabs hold of London and shakes out its secrets’ (The Economist).

A more generous interpretation of the affair might be that Judah – compared by the Financial Times to George Orwell and, like the great writer, sleeping rough for his research – was trying to outdo his role-model for sheer, masochistic bluntness, and went too far. Now, with the wind has changed and he is paying the price.

From a moral point of view his descriptions are, but for their honesty, difficult to defend. They’re arguably dehumanising, ugly and divisive, and most writers in 2024 – not, perhaps, purely due to social pressure or careerism – would think twice before setting them down on paper. Indeed, were they to do so, a modern ‘sensitivity reader’ would cheerfully strike them out. There’s also a certain irony in seeing a Labour adviser – Labour, with their kneeling prime minister, identity politics and pronoun-vibes – commit such non-PC blunders. It remains to be seen if Judah’s government contacts secure him better treatment than that meted out to Kate Clanchy.

Yet there are other questions the case raises, important for the future of literature. How far is it permissible for authors to go in recording their honest impressions of the individuals they encounter? Will a writer’s morality be more under the microscope when describing nationalities that are not his own? And what consequences will such ‘offence archaeology’ have for authors, their back-catalogues and future careers?

There’s Judah’s age to consider too. Born in 1988, he’ll have reached reading maturity before the world began to turn its back on writers like Paul Theroux – with his often grotesque descriptions of encounters on his travels – or before it looked more askance at novels like Martin Amis’s The Rachel Papers, with its account of a ‘hunchbacked’ tramp (‘The Mobile Armpit’) and graphic descriptions of the central character’s ageing mother, who has ‘buttocks [which] dance behind her knees like punch-balls’ and resembles ‘a slightly effeminate farm labourer’. Judah is at least old enough to have shaken hands with such literary fashions, however out of date they may now seem.

It would be a loss for everyone if, following the attacks on Judah, authors – an increasingly beleaguered and jumpy profession – felt even more hamstrung in what they could describe. So often vivid writing – the really memorable kind – is created by writers not saying what they ought to but what, by all standards of politeness, they probably shouldn’t. Good novels, as Orwell put it, ‘are not written by orthodoxy-sniffers, nor by people who are conscience stricken about their own orthodoxy. Good novels are written by people who are not frightened.’

None of this is to assume that Judah’s book is a good one – its busy descriptions are a little frenetic for this reader, but then so is the city that spawned them – or that he is not ‘conscience stricken’. We will doubtless, as in the case of Kate Clanchy, see a raft of apologies coming this week, in words one can well imagine: ‘insensitivity to London’s diverse communities… any upset I have caused… embarrassment I have brought to the Labour party… will do better in future.’

Yet times (and literary fashions) happen in their own terms, not ours. We should perhaps remember, given the rate of cultural change, that January 2016 – pre-Brexit, pre-Trump, pre MeToo, pre-George Floyd and the BLM riots – was another world. If ‘the past is a foreign country,’ it’s perhaps one entitled to slightly more respect and humility before its differences than critics argue Judah has shown – and the kind of tolerance which, partisan politics aside, any one of us in similar straits would wish to receive. Ben Judah’s public ‘disgrace’ over the past few days may be another bracing example of Labour hypocrisy, but no one, least of all writers, should be celebrating too wildly. Ask not for whom X is trending – it is trending for thee.