JK Rowling: right first time.

I somehow suspect that Harry Potter news isn't at the top of your priorities, but I thought this was interesting – and disappointing. In a heavily trailed interview which hasn't yet been published, JK Rowling said that:

…her famous protagonist ought to have ended up with Hermione instead.
In a rare interview given to Wonderland magazine, she said: "I wrote the Hermione/Ron relationship as a form of wish fulfilment…That’s how it was conceived, really. For reasons that have very little to do with literature and far more to do with me clinging to the plot as I first imagined it, Hermione ended up with Ron."

If you've read the Harry Potter novels, you'll know that despite his bourgeois niceness, Harry is the alpha male: the Chosen One whose suffering, death and resurrection will rid the world of evil Voldemort. Hermione (my personal favourite for obvious reasons) is one of Propp's Helpers, aiding Harry by reading and thinking a lot. Ron is also a Helper – most of the time – thanks to his key qualities of loyalty, groundedness, patience, good humour and determination.

However, Ron's an interesting character. The youngest son and nearly the youngest child in a large family of poor and boisterous over-achievers (as the oldest of six, I can report that my own sisters and brother are pitiable, broken-down and damaged individuals)*, Ron clearly suffers from depression and self-esteem deficiency both within the family and in his social circle. Lacking confidence in his abilities and overshadowed by the more obvious talents of his friends, he plays the novels' Everyman, channelling the fears and perspectives of the non-heroic reader.

In the novels, Hermione and Ron's very gradual romance plays out over the multiple novels with a good deal of humour, angst and fumbling (emotional, that is), as Hermione's impatient intellect, Ron's self-doubt, their traumatic experiences and adolescent development combine to impede their progress. Harry's Christ-like isolation initially seems to preclude him from forming relationships: destined to die, he has a brief relationship with Cho Chang but seems to be transcending romance until Rowling unexpectedly provides him with a life partner in the form of Ron's younger sister Ginny, providing Harry with a reason to live and the novels with a good deal of awkward Freudian worry and comedy.

JK Rowling now regrets not pairing the Hero with Hermione who is almost his female counterpart: characters constantly tell her that she is the most accomplished and intelligent witch of her generation. I like Hermione because she's a popular culture intellect, but I'm sad that JKR has decided that 'literary' concerns should have paired her off with Harry. In Propp's Morphology of the Folk-Tale, the Hero completes his Quest and is rewarded with the Princess, who is therefore reduced to a prize for success. This is what Hermione would have been, to the detriment of both the text and the novels' moral universe. Harry and Hermione would have been a Power Couple, the confirmation of a set of values which prizes heroism, beauty and perfection over everything else and assumes that Ubermensch types should be paired off together. And as a correspondent points out: Hermione and Harry are an excellent example of passionate, devoted non-sexual friendship. One of the later films flirts with attraction between them when Ron's depression causes him to (temporarily) abandon them, but they resist. One of the sexist clichés I hate most is 'men and women can't be friends, there's always sexual attraction': not true in life, why should it be true in fiction?

Hermione and Ron upset the standard model of the folk tale, and open up a new range of romantic possibilities. Why does Hermione love Ron in Harry Potter? Perhaps because he's honest, funny, faces his own demons, struggles for a defined identity and doesn't have a Messiah Complex. Ron is an inspiration to those of us who aren't hero material but hopefully do have loveable qualities suitable for the Muggle world. There isn't an obvious alternative partner for Ron in Harry Potter given that he's clearly written as heterosexual – leaving him alone might have been interesting but not appropriate for the kind of novels they are, in which loose ends aren't wanted, whereas pairing him with Hermione suits Rowling's mildly subversive approach to social structures.

So I'm sad that JKR feels the pressure of hegemonic ideology and regrets not doing the obvious thing. The point of Ron/Hermione is that attraction is more random, ambiguous and mysterious than Hero/Heroine recognising each other's greatness. Ron is flawed and near-perfect Hermione is attracted to him. If that's not a wonderful, mysterious and inspiring thing, I don't know what is.

*This is not true. They're all high-achievers who view me with a sense of amused pity.

Why I love JK Rowling

Leaving the books aside for a moment, it's this piece from 2010.

Nobody who has ever experienced the reality of poverty could say “it’s not the money, it’s the message”. When your flat has been broken into, and you cannot afford a locksmith, it is the money. When you are two pence short of a tin of baked beans, and your child is hungry, it is the money. When you find yourself contemplating shoplifting to get nappies, it is the money. If Mr Cameron’s only practical advice to women living in poverty, the sole carers of their children, is “get married, and we’ll give you £150”, he reveals himself to be completely ignorant of their true situation.

How many prospective husbands did I ever meet, when I was the single mother of a baby, unable to work, stuck inside my flat, night after night, with barely enough money for life’s necessities? Should I have proposed to the youth who broke in through my kitchen window at 3am? Half a billion pounds, to send a message — would it not be more cost-effective, more personal, to send all the lower-income married people flowers? 

Suggestions that Mr Cameron seems oblivious to how poor people actually live, think and behave seem to provoke accusations of class warfare. Let me therefore state, for the record, that I do not think it any more his fault that he spent his adolescence in the white tie and tails of Eton than that I spent the almost identical period in the ghastly brown-and-yellow stylings of Wyedean Comprehensive. I simply want to know that aspiring prime ministers have taken the trouble to educate themselves about the lives of all kinds of Britons, not only the sort that send messages with banknotes.

But wait, some will say. Given that you have long since left single parenthood for marriage and a nuclear family; given that you are now so far from a life dependent on benefits that Private Eye habitually refers to you as Rowlinginnit, why do you care? Surely, nowadays, you are a natural Tory voter?

No, I’m afraid not. The 2010 election campaign, more than any other, has underscored the continuing gulf between Tory values and my own. It is not only that the renewed marginalisation of the single, the divorced and the widowed brings back very bad memories. There has also been the revelation, after ten years of prevarication on the subject, that Lord Ashcroft, deputy chairman of the Conservatives, is non-domiciled for tax purposes.

The fact remains that the first time I ever met my recently retired accountant, he put it to me point-blank: would I organise my money around my life, or my life around my money? If the latter, it was time to relocate to Ireland, Monaco, or possibly Belize.

I chose to remain a domiciled taxpayer for a couple of reasons. The main one was that I wanted my children to grow up where I grew up, to have proper roots in a culture as old and magnificent as Britain’s; to be citizens, with everything that implies, of a real country, not free-floating ex-pats, living in the limbo of some tax haven and associating only with the children of similarly greedy tax exiles.

A second reason, however, was that I am indebted to the British welfare state; the very one that Mr Cameron would like to replace with charity handouts. When my life hit rock bottom, that safety net, threadbare though it had become under John Major’s Government, was there to break the fall. I cannot help feeling, therefore, that it would have been contemptible to scarper for the West Indies at the first sniff of a seven-figure royalty cheque. This, if you like, is my notion of patriotism. On the available evidence, I suspect that it is Lord Ashcroft’s idea of being a mug.

Child poverty remains a shameful problem in this country, but it will never be solved by throwing millions of pounds of tax breaks at couples who have no children at all. David Cameron tells us that the Conservatives have changed, that they are no longer the “nasty party”, that he wants the UK to be “one of the most family-friendly nations in Europe”, but I, for one, am not buying it. He has repackaged a policy that made desperate lives worse when his party was last in power, and is trying to sell it as something new. I’ve never voted Tory before ... and they keep on reminding me why.