How I managed to write my (very annoying) first novel

Although not autobiographical, I confess I share many things with my creation David Britton. I too was once a high-minded BBC documentary maker and I too now loathe Auntie with a visceral passion. I too once created an IT communications company that went south. I too got older and wiser and started railing at wokery like a drunken Reform-nik outside a migrants-only hotel. And, most importantly, I too found my way back to the Jewish family after leaving for many years in the hope of becoming a man of the secular world. Judaism does not easily surrender its souls. As the title suggests, The Very Annoying Jew is a very Jewy book. And, to my mind, Britton is a worthy Jewish hero.

I always wanted him to be something more than just cartoon funny: a principled schlemazel rather than an opportunistic schlemiel. I wanted a man with a kind heart who would stalwartly defend liberty and freedom of expression even if it meant driving those around him to distraction. I considered various options for Britton – an anguished doctor, a conscience-stricken journalist, a soulful taxi driver, a doe-eyed academic – but in the end I decided my hero should be a dishevelled, dissolute, privileged boomer with a public school education, a serious hang-up about Judaism and a penchant for insulting just about everyone who lives in Islington.

Look, of course I knew my hero would struggle. Who in “progressive” Britain would warm to this washed-up celeb whose views strayed well to the right of the Guardian? Who would take seriously a man who mocked the silliness of modern youth culture and the excesses of internet memedom? A man who was over the hill but refuses to shut his mouth? I also realised also that my caustic manuscript was pretty much untouchable – that it would traumatise 99.999 per cent of the world’s literary agents, outrage publishers, and give anyone working for BBC Verify a heart attack. And there’d be zero chance of invitations to literary lunches in Covent Garden, but every chance of one to some human rights court on a charge of literary genocide. That is why my entire marketing campaign consisted of precisely one five-line email (gags, mostly) to one publisher, the creator of Envelope Books, Dr Stephen Games.

I figured he was perhaps the only publisher in the Western world with the courage and meshugas to actually read the book and judge it on its merits. And I was right.

My greatest literary hero is Isaac Babel, the Russian-Jewish writer who wrote exquisitely of Cossacks, communists and Jewish gangsters and was murdered by Stalin for his efforts. When I think of Babel, I remember there were times when literature – and Jewish literature – was brave, when writers and publishers were prepared to take chances. Today, most writers and publishers are scared of their own shadows and have surrendered to wokedom. Well, it’s time to fight back.

These are not easy times for Jews. Every day we face new assaults on every front. So there is much to write about and nothing hits back as powerfully as humour. And once you hit 70, like Britton, you no longer care. And you feel, with some urgency, the need and responsibility to write your truth. About Torah, about Israel, about the Jewish people and about the world. So here he is, Mr David Britton, my annoying, funny and unexpectedly heroic Jew.

The Very Annoying Jew is published by Envelope Books