Robert Harris trashes new PFD boss Michel

Robert Harris is about with his new novel The Ghost, and in the Evening Standard today he addresses the topic of Caroline Michel, a friend of the former deputy prime minister Michael Heseltine and new embattled boss of literary agency PFD. With spectacular froideur he reminds amnesiacs or the plain ignorant (eg gossip writers aged 24 working on the Standard’s Londoner’s Diary) that Michel “did not reinvent the wheel” at PFD. She and her bosses CSS Stellar are trying to make out that their multi-media plan for PFD is a commercial innovation, but as Harris says: “It’s hardly as if she has discovered something that has never been thought of before.

“I wrote Enigma and Pat Kavanagh is my agent and then Anthony Jones managed the film rights and the film was directed by Michael Apted and starred Kate Winslet and the screenplay was written by Tom Stoppard and we are all from PFD. This whole idea [of a multi-media agency] has been around for the past decade or so. It’s just a sop really. It is treating writers as commodities and you can’t just do that.”

Kavanagh has resigned and not been sacked from PFD – please note Londoner’s Diary! – and Harris will stay loyal to her when she moves on and sets up her own agency. The last I heard, Michel wanted to digest David Godwin’s agency in the PFD maw. What’s happening there, please?

Caroline Michel: Heseltine's pal grabs PFD

The defection of Caroline Michel from the William Morris Agency to rival agency PFD has shocked British publishing. An Independent on Sunday piece gives a good sense of scale [click here]. Michel's appointment is a clear sign that owners CSS Stellar want PFD turned into an international super agency and that a proposed management buyout by some of its agents is not an option. One consequence is that PFD may lose many of them as it feathers down with Michel.

As the Indy on Sunday says: "PFD represents some of the biggest names in the literary world including Simon Schama, Julian Barnes, Alan Bennett, John Mortimer and Joanna Trollope, as well as stars of stage, screen and comedy, including Kate Winslet, Dawn French and Ricky Gervais. It also holds the copyright to the literary estates of Hilaire Belloc, Nancy Mitford, JB Priestley, Evelyn Waugh and Rebecca West."

Caroline Michel, 48 - known to some as Lady Gush because of her flamboyant charm - is the wife of Matthew (now Lord) Evans, the former chairman of Faber. It is known that she was a close friend of the late, self-confessedly philandering MP Alan Clark. Subsequently, she enjoyed a friendship with the former deputy prime minister Michael Heseltine.

Lady Gush is lovely but incredibly expensive to maintain. She got a mega-package from William Morris but Americans demand premium delivery in return. She has an address book better than the Queen's: they expected the names she dropped - Sean Connery et al - to come on board and of course they didn`t.

She jumped ship from HarperCollins seconds before she was pushed and the same has happened again. She lost WM mega-money, HarperCollins likewise - but she manages to go and charm the striped suits in the city who don`t know the bottomlines.

Her appointment as the £400k chief executive of PFD was made over the heads not only of very long-standing and experienced agents like Michael Sisson and Caroline Dawnay - which was just plain rude but these types have no manners - but of Pat Kavanagh (Julian Barnes' wife). Now she's a bisexual lady with a house so anally retentively tidy that I'm surprised it has not drawn the interest of a psychiatrist: she has not enough to do but still has the energy to bear a lifetime grudge - she penned the line: "Vengeance is mine".

She went mad when she heard of Michel's appointment - and they really do dislike each other. Kavanagh refused to attend Michel's first meeting of the senior troops and is planning a coup - she wants to set up on her own agency with others from PFD. These refusenik agents had planned a management buyout and some of them are starting to see that Kavanagh is not of an age to found an agency. Also, they wouldn't have the PFD name behind them - and it IS a name - and second thoughts are dawning generally at the prospect of income and status loss. I suspect lots of secret meetings are taking place with and without Kavanagh.

More anon.