Lionel Shriver said she is scared to travel to the UK following the arrest of Graham Linehan.

The Irish The Father Ted writer was detained by five armed police officers at Heathrow airport on Monday after mocking trans people in three social media posts.

The bestselling author of We Need to Talk About Kevin, who is from the US but now lives in Portugal, told Piers Morgan Uncensored: “The Graham Linehan story really makes me nervous on my own account.

“I had a completely selfish reaction to that story, because I’m worried that, given what I have put into print, I could be arrested the next time I come to the UK.”

Shriver is an outspoken critic of what she describes as a “deeply disturbing social obsession with transgenderism”, with her most recent work, Mania, focusing on a society in which the “woke” fight against “cognitive discrimination”, decreeing that every person has the same level of intelligence.

“If there’s any single social mania that this book is based on, it’s really transgenderism,” she previously told The Telegraph.