One of the contemporary reviews of The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand’s best-selling “philosophical” novel from 1943, said that “anyone who is taken in by it deserves a stern lecture on paper rationing”. If we were to plot political influence on one axis and sheer philosophical and literary rubbish on the other axis, the books of Ayn Rand would be in the top right-hand quadrant. Rand’s work has few peers in the category of influential trash and a predilection for her half-thought nostrums is always the tip-off that someone is better avoided.
Sajid Javid, the new Health Secretary, is one of those who needs the lecture on paper rationing. He has said in the past that he was in the habit, until his wife rebelled, of reading the court room scene from The Fountainhead aloud to her every so often. In a plot so contrived that it is hardly worth summarising, the egoistic architect hero Howard Roark is put on trial for offences against the public taste, whereupon he delivers a great rallying cry to the freedom of the individual.
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