Lord Weidenfeld: It’s far easier being 95

Born in Vienna in 1919, George emigrated to London after the Anschluss in 1938 and started working with the BBC's monitoring service, swiftly becoming a political commentator and newspaper columnist. In that capacity, he made contact with governments in exile, befriending the likes of de Gaulle and Tito.

I simply try to inspire other people

In 1948, he met Nigel Nicolson and they decided to start an upmarket magazine, a mix of the New Statesman, the New Yorker and Fortune. But the wartime paper ban remained, and a clever lawyer suggested a way round it by printing some of the content between hard covers and calling it a book - and, to avoid any problems with the authorities, also printing some genuine books. Thus was Weidenfeld and Nicolson born.

Within a year, however, George was taking a sabbatical to work as Chaim Weizmann's chief of cabinet. He says he was "dumbfounded" at the time to get the job. With hindsight, it seems entirely unsurprising; his calls are taken by statesmen and women across the world, from Angela Merkel to the Prince of Wales, and in the current government his friends include George Osborne and Michael Gove.

When he wrote a piece for The Times welcoming German unification after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the first call he received was from Helmut Kohl asking him to lunch at the ''Bungalow in Bonn'', a lunch which ended up lasting more than three hours. "Are there others like you?" Kohl asked. When George said yes, Kohl said "find them for me", picked up the phone to the president of the Bertelsmann Stiftung and told him: "I want you to finance a bi-annual conference to talk about German-Jewish and German-Israeli relationships".

That emerged as the German Jewish Dialogue. Kohl became a personal friend, and came to George's birthday party with his "side-kick", one Angela Merkel. She then, when she was a junior minister, regularly invited George to her constituency to take part in an annual seminar on foreign affairs. When she became Chancellor she treated him as an informal adviser.

His contacts list makes Who's Who look like a fusty, dated list of non-entities.

When I meet him, I always ask him the same question: why? Why, at 95, does he never let up? He reminds me of the conductor Pierre Monteux who, when offered the post of principal conductor of the LSO at at age of 86, accepted on condition that he was given a 25-year contract, with a 25-year option of renewal.

But George's projects keep coming, whether it's fundraising for a series of professorships of modern Israel studies, working on his think tank, the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, which (among many other things) arranges scholarships to Oxford and meetings between leading politicians and cultural figures, or his latest idea - a sort of Kindertransport for Syrian refugees.

He says that, at 95, it's paradoxically easier: "I gather 70 years of activity so my networks are greater, things become much easier and I simply try to inspire other people. I try to bring people together and to encourage their natural contacts."

That is, I think, the very definition of false modesty.

One of his most potentially far reaching creations began, like much else in George's life, over lunch. A mutual friend put him in touch with Len Blavatnik when the billionaire businessman first moved here. Over the coffee in Wiltons in Jermyn Street, Blavatnik asked George what he could do to leave a legacy in his new country.

George replied that Blavatnik had unwittingly given him the answer over lunch. Enthusing to George about his US education, it was clear where his interests lay. So George told him that we needed a British version of the Kennedy School of Government - and that he would put it together. Which he then helped to do - and is now joint chairman with Lord Browne of the Blavatnik School of Government's International Advisory Board at Oxford.

That now works together with another of his creations - the Weidenfeld Hoffman scholarships, named jointly with Andre Hoffman, chair of Hoffman La Roche. These are a form of Rhodes Scholarship for Eastern Europe, Russia, Central Asia and the Middle East.

Given the scope and breadth of his influence and work, it's no wonder that he is almost certainly the most decorated Jew in Britain, with the GBE, which has only ever been given to four Jews (Herbert Samuel, Victor and Jacob Rothschild and George), honorary doctorates from Oxford, Exeter University and King's College; Fellowships of St Anne's and St Peter's Colleges, Oxford; a post as a Senator of Bonn University; an honorary degree from Vienna University; and the highest orders in Germany, Italy and Austria.  

Although he is the ultimate insider - a peer of the realm, on first-name terms with most of the establishment in Europe and much of the US and Middle East - on another level, he remains something of an outsider; that level being the British Jewish establishment. He is a friend of Mick Davis and Gerald Ronson, but when we think of Jewish leaders, his name rarely, if ever, crops up.

And yet he is in a different league to many of the parochial, community-fixated hacks who strut around as if they are the real deal. Perhaps it is because he operates in that different league. His network of contacts and influence extends far beyond the UK. In Germany, for example, he writes a newspaper column eight times a month and is one of the most influential public figures.

His European network gives him real insight into some of the EU's current difficulties. Listening to him talk about the details of the renegotiations of Britain's membership, one has to remind oneself that he is 95. As things stand, he rates our chances of success at something like 60/40. "It is beginning to dawn on them that they get more by having us in than out."

Today, much of his mind is focused not on what he calls the ''quixotic'' antisemitism of the far right but on jihadism - a threat he was alive to many years ago, long before some of our slower-minded political leaders. For George, traditional antisemitism is now almost an irrelevance, which can be dealt with through savvy and effort. Where it is dangerous now is when it is focused on Israel. That is critical, and why jihadism is such a threat.

His motivation, he says, is to make us all aware that much of this is a matter of life and death - of Israel's life, and the West's, too. "My starting point is the assumption that we are not morbid, and that we choose life over death." In that respect it is no real choice, just as he feels he has no alternative but to carry on with his work.

But, to me, there is an astonishing optimism about George and his work.

How else do you describe a man who at 95 sets up a programme to bring refugees to safety, and whose work is dominated by projects that will take a generation to mature?

Although in George's exceptional case, perhaps the best word is not "optimist" but "realist".