Harry Potter author JK Rowling pays off the man who conjured up her millions To add insult to injury, Rowling, who has an estimated fortune of £530million, joined one of his business partners, Neil Blair, at a new agency that he set up. Her defection came the month after she announced that she would launch a website, Pottermore. She had worked closely with Blair, a lawyer, on the site while he was still with Little. It is expected to earn her many more millions through the sale of ebooks and online games.. Her ditching of Little brought to an end the most commercially successful relationship in literary history. The Yorkshireman reportedly struck a deal under his usual terms when he first signed up the then impecunious single mother: 15 per cent of gross earnings for the British market and 20 per cent for merchandising rights, for film, for the American market and for translation deals. Growing charity Mike Leigh, the director of such films as Vera Drake and Secrets & Lies, was in typically cantankerous form at the Critics" Circle Theatre Awards on Tuesday. "For those who gave us great reviews, and some of them were brilliant, I would like to thank you for your intelligence and sensitivity," said Leigh, who won a prize for Grief. For those of you who gave us bad reviews, I forgive you for your crass stupidity. Red carpet Burns To celebrate Burns Night, there will be a Scottish theme for the National Television Awards, screened live on ITV1 on Wednesday. George Mitchell, the executive producer, hopes that many of the guests will wear kits, but has concerns. "It's going to be a gusty evening and the red carpet is outdoors," he tells me. We don't want it to make front page news for all the wrong reasons.