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
Cat Stevens' comments about Salman Rushdie mass burning of Cat Stevens' records, later changed to a mass steamrolling. Islam claimed that he had earlier unsuccessfully asked his record company to stop production of his Cat Stevens records but they had refused on economic grounds. Commenting on the controversy regarding the United States government's 2004 refusal to allow Stevens/Islam to enter the country, Middle East scholar Juan Cole criticised him, saying that he "never forgave him [Stevens] for advocating the execution of Salman Rushdie," and claiming he had "later explained this position away by saying that he did not endorse vigilante action against Rushdie, but would rather