I know the feeling!

Three years ago, I [Melanie Phillips] wrote a proposal for a book about the alarming resurgence of anti-Jewish feeling in Britain, the way this had been taken up by the left and the fact that this was undermining Britain’s ability to defend itself against global Islamist terrorism. My literary agent thought it was good stuff and sent it round. Every publishing house said no.

I was taken aside by a senior editor at a big-name imprint who was well-disposed towards me. ‘Drop it’, he said. ‘No British publisher will touch this’. Why? Because it defended Israel, already well on the way to becoming a pariah state, and worse still levelled the charge of anti-Jewish prejudice against the British intelligentsia.

I broadened out the proposal to include an analysis of what I thought was the true nature of the threat posed by the Islamic jihad; the back-to-front thinking in Britain which was turning Islamist aggressors into victims while western and Israeli victims were turned into aggressors; the role played in this process by multiculturalism; and the lethal threat this all posed to a free world under attack.

My agent sent this proposal to specifically Jewish publishers in the hope of touching a nerve. It touched one all right - the problem was it was the wrong nerve. ‘I don’t agree with this AT ALL so I won’t publish it’, said one. Another jovially observed: ‘I’d rather take ricin than publish this’. The battle to publish Londonistan

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Mark Alexander