If there is one thing that makes me wish to quit the august and extremely pleasurable position I hold as literary editor of The Times it’s the annual debate about the merits of the Orange Prize. A prize for women authors: Sexist Con-Trick (as Tim Lott has it) or Force For Good? You choose.

Here’s where I stand. Get over it. Not, Get Over It You Awful Men and Let Us Redress Centuries of Repression Through the Virtues of Our X-Chromosome-Only Prize! I mean, get over it, in a broader sense.

Get over the idea that prizes given to novels – of any kind, stripe, gender or nationality – can, in any way whatsoever, be described as “fair”.

I have told this story before but I will tell it again. When Arundhati Roy won the Booker Prize for The God of Small Things, she told the assembled throng that she was honoured and humbled to have won the prize – not least because, she was sure, five different judges would have chosen a different book. How right she was, and how wise to remind us of the inherent subjectivity of this endeavour.

If there is an issue with the Orange Prize this year, it’s that they’ve gone farther down the Celebrity Judge road in choosing Lily Allen.

I don’t know Miss Allen, and have nothing against her personally but, from what I see in the papers, I’m not sure reading is that high on her list of recreations.

The Orange has a fair amount of that kind of credibility already – Suzanne Vega was a judge one year – but the choice of Allen (who is also the youngest judge, at 22) seems, shall we say, a stretch.

Having said that, this is certainly a strong longlist; I’m sorry not to see Nicola Barker’s Darkmans on there, Sarah Hall’s The Carhullan Army or Min Jin Lee’s Free Food for Millionaires, but that’s how the cookie crumbles. Because prizes, let’s remember, are not fair.

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