Jamie Oliver’s pulped fiction brings shame on British publishers

The furore surrounding the TV chef’s latest book for children is pathetic – the industry should be fearless, not cowardly

I have in my hands a rare thing. Not an unsigned one, as the old gag goes, but even rarer: an un-pulped one.

For there we’ve been, myself and the oldest of my second crop of children (he’s six) on his bed in the evening reading. It’s a weighty tome but with lots of pictures and endless action. It’s been a break from the norm; a diet of Roald Dahl, The Famous Five, a lot of Paddington and Just William, the latter to which we howl with laughter.

And while he’s quite enjoyed it, I’ve struggled. For Jamie Oliver’s latest tome, Billy and the Epic Escape, does not perform that trick of the greatest of children’s book authors and engage both grown-up and kid. But, then again, I don’t think Roald Dahl ever knocked up a blinding peri peri chicken. Renaissance men are a rarity in this world, so for this Jamie Oliver, chef, restaurateur and campaigner, can be forgiven.

But as we neared the end of the book, news came that what we thought was a safe bedtime adventure turns out to be an atrocious insult, a book of outrageous offence, of gross insensitivity and reckless ignorance.

For there, within those pages, was written something so dire that the book had suddenly been withdrawn from books shops in this country and around the world. Shelves and tables were cleared, vans dispatched to collect the dastardly tomes and great piles in warehouses were removed. Pulped presumably, and then I trust, as Jamie has his finger on the pulse of sustainability, used to help ferment the night soil of developing countries or as fuel to power the schools of the underprivileged.

What was this transgression, this appalling act of insensitivity? And how on earth could it have come from the pen of a guy quite so nice as Jamie?

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