Orange Prize admits: Lily wasn't up to the job

During the unveiling of the Orange Prize longlist, organisers mumbled that, yes Lily Allen had been quietly dropped as a judge, and the ill-health was a cover story.

Although this would seem to suggest those whose eyebrows were raised when Allen was first named as a judge might have had their eyebrows in the right place, the usually sensible Kirsty Lang insisted those who thought that judging a serious book award was probably going to stretch Lily were wrong. Even though, erm, they appear to have been right:

Kirsty Lang, chairman of this year’s panel, insisted that Allen had been a good choice of judge, and that critics who had been disparaging of her were “being snobby and elitist”.

“Life got in the way,” she told The Times. “She lost a baby, her boyfriend left her and she was launching a new television show. She was under a hell of a lot of pressure. She found the pressure of judging a major book prize on top of everything else too much.”

The singer had taken part in drawing up the longlist “by phone”, she added. “She reads, she writes her own songs. She’s a wordsmith.”

There's no reason why a singer can't judge a literary prize, and it is fair enough that the pressures of her personal life would have been unpredictable, but isn't it a little patronising to suggest that her life made it too difficult for her to actually read the books and attend the meetings she'd signed up for? Is Lang suggesting that the other judges live lives of uncomplicated leisure? Is stringing together a few half-hours of YouTube videos for BBC Three really comparable with, say, presenting Front Row?