I need a man to find the dipstick but still find Citroën’s story fascinating

Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis thanked Keir for the great honour of our invites but refrained from saying: “Loving the canapes… but is there any chance of a change in the law to stop us being targeted and murdered?”

There is a Race Relations Act which specifically bans “hate speech”. So why doesn’t it cover phrases like “globalise the intifada,” or, as Jess Phillips MP called it several times on LBC, the infitada, which sounds like a Latin American dance craze? “Death to the IDF” means one thing: an instruction to murder Israeli soldiers and thus bring down the Jewish state.

“Action for Palestine” addicts cite Israel’s “disproportionate response” to the bloody pogrom of October 7. I would suggest that two years of absurd disruption, hate speech and incitement to violence from these damaging demos makes disproportionate look like the euphemism of the decade.

The day after the Downing Street event, there was a statement from the head of the Met saying the phrase was going to be banned. Great – but how do you impose that ban on a crowd of manic believers? Do you arrest 2000 people? That is all the prisons and courts need. Do you taser the culprits? Somehow the Jews would get the blame. No. During peace negotiations, just stop the marches.

They carted away little Greta Thunberg and her grubby placard this week, protesting against a non-existent genocide. Bored with getting no decent PR over climate change she has seamlessly switched to a hotter issue, because nothing is hotter than whether the Jewish state should exist. I know she has several honorary doctorates, but when, one wonders, did the poor little person – whose middle name, incidentally, is Tintin (sorry, miaow!) – last attend tenth grade? I’m pretty sure she’s not studying much history. Her-story, certainly.

French history tells us that the French government after the battles of 1968 requisitioned the Citroen car industry. David has a much-loved, little-driven, Citroen DS which draws a crowd whenever we drive anywhere in her (her pronouns are elle/elle, or vrum/vrum). Elle’s carriage and undercarriage is cared for by Stuart Agar, allegedly the most erudite mechanic in England. He has published two magnificently illustrated books on the relationship between French social history and the Citroen car. Petrova Fossil would have “shpiggled” from them. Even I, who has to get a man in to locate the dipstick, found them fascinating and very readable.

But I digress. Andre Citroen, born in Paris in 1878, of Dutch/Polish Jewish heritage – the name derives from the Dutch for little lemon – created and ultimately lost an industrial empire which changed the face of France and the nature of motoring. He invented chevron-toothed gears; national advertising of the Citreons; mass production; and factories which fitted the body as well as the chassis of his cars. (You can hear the voice of Wikipedia kicking in, I know.)

He was also a fair and paternal employer, who offered medical facilities, creches and a gym to his workers. He read his Torah, that Andre.

When the company ran into financial trouble, the government, short of requisitioning the business, arranged transfer ownership to Michelin, Citroen’s biggest creditor. Under the Nazi collaborators of the Vichy government, Citroen was forced to produce supply trucks for the German occupiers, which they subtly sabotaged, in their own factories, to make them break down.

Now, bringing us up to date, David and I had motored down in Elle to a little place near Chichester, where we sojourned, as it is said. The following day, we visited some of the myriad antique shops which abound thereof. We both like old watches and in a case at the end of the shop we discovered a small round-faced watch featuring the italicised word ‘Lip’. Interesting…

The same day Stuart rang to say he’s been researching requisitioned firms in France and he wondered whether I was related to the Lip watch founder, Emmanuel Lipmann, born 1867 who founded his first factory in Besancon in the late 19th century. In the 1970s, his son Fred, transitioned the company from craftsmanship to assembly line, but since it was run on socialist principles, the president, Giscard D’Estaing despised it and leaned heavily on Lipmann to sell out to a Swiss company.

The workers were having none of this. There was a strike during which, they more or less mobilised France into a ‘Lip March’ of 100,000 people, after which they took over the company and ran it themselves until 1977.

David and I loved the story so much that he quietly made enquiries and found me the Lip watch which I wear every day.

That should be the end of the piece, but looking back at the theatre programme for Ballet Shoes I found out that the classic car, I had seen on stage, which saved the fortunes of the Fossil family was none other than a Citroen DS.

So there you are, editor, a Jewish connection after all. Phew.