Victoria Smith starts with a wry joke.

My youngest son has audio versions of all of the Harry Potter books. Given the public pronouncements of a certain artist, I’ve started to find this problematic. True, one can separate the art from the creator, but sometimes the latter’s hateful beliefs infect the former. This is the case when actor Stephen Fry reads the works of brilliant, principled writer J.K. Rowling.

Gotcha! It’s not JKR who is “problematic”; it’s the Problematic-sniffing Policers of Discourse who are problemyish.

There’s something in the way he voices each female character, from Hermoine Grainger to Dolores Umbridge, which reeks of misogyny. The way to sound like a woman, in Fry’s view, is to make yourself high-pitched, whiny and annoying, no matter what you have to say. I haven’t banned my son from listening because the books are still wonderful. Nonetheless, every time I hear Fry holding forth, I’m reminded of Liz Lochhead’s poem “Men Talk”: “Women prattle / Women waffle and wiffle / Men talk.”

And that goes double triple a millionle for Stephen Fry – he’s got that lofty Oxbridge, from a great height accent and tone down cold. To put it more crisply, he talks posh. It’s a weapon, and he’s not ashamed to use it.

And if women are going to keep talking, it seems that the least they can do is shut up about serious issues such as their own existence in law. Fry has become the latest self-appointed man of reason to express dismay at Rowling’s involvement in current debates around sex and gender. Speaking to The Show People podcast, Fry, a man who once told sexual abuse victims to “grow up” and stop being so “self-pitying”, believes that Rowling, a woman who uses her own money to help such victims, has become “cruel” and “mocking”. Then again, he suggests, perhaps she can’t help it.

Where’s his equivalent of Beira’s Place?