Keeping himself busy ... Michael Portillo. Photograph: Martin Argles
The embargo has lifted. We know who the next chairman of the Man Booker Fiction Prize will be: Michael Portillo.
Two questions follow. 1) Why did they ask him? 2) What's in it for him?
The first is the easier to answer. Portillo has high profile. And he fits the panel's recurrent pendulum swing between pointy-headed professor and member of the real world. Looking back over the past five years, it's been Portillo (MRW), Howard Davies (MRW), Hermione Lee (PHP), and me (PHP).
The split character of the chair, from year to year, represents the two tendencies at the heart of the award: 1) to look inward at the complex world of fiction to extract what is the finest novel of the year; 2) to promote fiction by means of a household name. As the Richard and Judy phenomenon indicates, the reading public often wants advice from people it can trust, in a general way, rather than experts. But then, why not listen to the experts now and again?
Portillo is a sound choice. He's very famous, his face is well known on TV, he's highly educated, and has a "trust me" aura. But what's in it for him? The chair, in my day (2005), got £7,000. For reading, that is, some 120 novels (some of them extremely demanding, all of them demanding attention), the bulk of which come between April and August. Then you go on to read a dozen of them twice, and six of them three times - as the long list and short list selections kick in. Add the meetings, the phone calls, the caballing, the travel, and - at the end of the year - your payment works out at (as I reckoned it) something less than £2 an hour. Salt mines are more remunerative and, with some of the novels, more fun.
Portillo must get seven grand for an after dinner speech, and doubtless not much less for a month's worth of op-eds for the Sunday Times and his sofa chats with Andrew Neil. Why would he knock himself out for Mr Booker's paltry pence? Pro bono?
Not only that, Bookering knocks holes in your summer vacation and, often enough, your day job. Howard Davies (one of the foremost economic commentators in the country) found himself in mid-September 2007 with the Northern Rock collapse to pronounce on, and the other problem of determining which was to be the best novel of 2007. What was Davies supposed to do - go on Newsnight and say "I really don't have a view about the financial crisis. I've been too far busy arguing with my fellow judges about whether On Chesil Beach is a novel or a novella"? Not to forget that September's also the first month of the academic year at the London School of Economics, which Davies runs. Has Portillo forgotten that there's the most important election in living history in November 2008, and his opinions on matters political may be more urgently called for than matters literary?
So why did Michael say yes? Is he, perhaps, trying to burnish his image as "two sensibilities Portillo", as part of a political comeback? Whatever his motive, he's a safe, middle-aged kind of choice for the 40th anniversary of what they now like to call "the world's premier literary award". Portillo is undeniably sensible and cultivated. But how well read is he in modern fiction? And does it matter? And, if it does matter, who cares?
We'll know in 10 months. But don't expect a lot of chairing if Gordon Brown calls a snap election in September 2008.
