The Boyhood of Raleigh the then Conservative leader William Hague as a small boy (this was common in satire at the time, as Hague had first attained national fame as a teenager in the 1970s), while two old sailors – former Foreign Secretary David Owen and former Chancellor of the Exchequer Denis Healey – gestured inland and away from a ship labelled "Euro". The two elder statesmen described themselves as pro-European but opposed to British membership of the Single Currency. The picture has also appeared in recent explorations of postcolonialism, most notably Salman Rushdie's novel "Midnight's Children", in which the narrator Saleem Sinai partly
Salman Rushdie controversy, provoking protests from Muslims in several countries. Death threats were made against him, including a "fatwā" calling for his assassination issued by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the Supreme Leader of Iran, on 14 February 1989. The British government put Rushdie under police protection. In 1983 Rushdie was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, the UK's senior literary organisation. He was appointed Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres of France in January 1999. In June 2007, Queen Elizabeth II knighted him for his services to literature. In 2008, "The Times" ranked him thirteenth on its list