The great and good of the publishing world turned out last night at the Wallace Collection to say farewell to outgoing CEO of Orion Books Peter Roche, including Lord Weidenfeld, überagent Caroline Michel, and authors Michael Palin, Kate Mosse and Rachel Billington. But the evening was marred by an unseemly altercation between two of the guests.
Michael Foster, until recently majority shareholder of showbiz agency the Rights House (whose clients include Chris Evans and Billie Piper) and ex-boss of literary agency Peters, Fraser and Dunlop, became involved in a heated verbal exchange with a fellow guest and, according to Orion sources, was threatened with the police.
The casus belli? Andrew Franklin, MD of Profile, had criticised Foster in the Bookseller in May saying his auctioning of an internship at PFD (which he has now sold) for £5,000 to raise money for Jill Shaw Ruddock’s Second Half Centre was “disgusting”. Franklin was quoted as saying: “Internships should not be the privilege of the rich. I don’t think we should be sending this message out about the already elitist London publishing industry. It is a really perverse thing for a charity to do.”
When Foster arrived last night he asked Franklin to “f***ing apologise”. Franklin refused. “I’m telling you, f***ing apologise”. According to eyewitnesses Foster, who is almost a foot shorter than Franklin, then squared up to him, and Anthony Keates of Orion asked him to leave. When he refused, Keates said he’d call the police. The event is believed to have been captured on CCTV. Franklin and Foster both declined to comment today but the episode shows how fraught the issue of internships has become.
