Comrade Potter

It has been widely reported that JK Rowling, authoress of the Harry Potter books, is a close ally and friend of the Dark Lord of Mordor and Kirkcaldy.

However it has fallen to the French to publicise the fact that the series of stories about the adventures of the boy magician Harry are not about a bit of fun for older kids (of all ages). Rather they are the story of the struggle endured by a ‘left-wing hero of the intellectual aristocracy against the materialist middle classes’.

France’s leading barricade raising pinko rag Liberation devoted today’s front cover and two inside pages to answering the question "Why Harry Potter is of the Left".

It must have been a bit of a slow news day in the Fifth Republic.

The paper invited philosopher Jean-Claude Milner to assess the work. He identified the works as reaction to the free-market revolution instigated by Margaret Thatcher's governments.

"Reading it, one has the feeling that J.K. Rowling feels, like many cultivated English people, that there was a real, catastrophic Thatcherite revolution, and that the only chance for culture now is to survive as an occult science," he wrote.

Milner identified the "Muggles" -- inhabitants of the ordinary, non-magical world -- as the uncultured bourgeoisie who did well materially out of the Thatcher years and later under Tony Blair.

"In the world described by J.K. Rowling, there are the Muggles, who represent the Thatchero-Blairite middle class (going from the lower middle class to the upper middle class), and then the others: the people, cultivated people and the penniless aristocracy, people whom you would expect to find in public schools or at Cambridge," he said.

Milner said the disinterested world of culture upheld by Harry Potter and his friends at the elite Hogwarts Academy represented a form of opposition to the values of the profit-seeking market economy.

"As such, Harry Potter is a war machine against the Thatcherite-Blairist world and the 'American Way of Life'."

Milner then apparently extracted his head from a lower orifice and quickly sparked up a Gauloises.

Rumour has it that there will be several copycat articles in the Guardian over the next few days.

Apparently Eric Carle’s seminal work ‘The Very Hungry Caterpillar’ is now to be viewed as an expose of rapacious bourgeois greed and Polly Toynbee is thought to be desirous of showing that the BBC Children’s television programme ‘In the Night Garden’ is in fact representative of the effectiveness of the Scandinavian Social model.