Roald Dahl was vile, but it would be a pity to cancel him

Where the Chilterns rise over Roald Dahl’s family home, which is now a museum, diggers are at work, tearing up the beech woods that inspired one of his greatest books, Danny the Champion of the World, to clear a path for HS2. In the wider world, however, it is Dahl’s reputation that is being dug into. 

Dahl’s family recently issued a quiet apology for infamous anti-Semitic comments he made in interviews in the final years of his life. ‘I’m certainly anti-Israel,’ he said in 1990, eight months before his death, ‘and I’ve become anti-Semitic in as much as that you get a Jewish person in another country like England strongly supporting Zionism’. Worse still, in another newspaper interview, Dahl claimed that ‘even a stinker like Hitler didn’t just pick on them [Jews] for no reason.’ 

The family — who net £12 million a year from his estate — were contrite: ‘Those prejudiced remarks are incomprehensible to us and stand in marked contrast to the man we knew and to the values at the heart of Roald Dahl’s stories, which have positively impacted young people for generations.