The other day I found myself profoundly moved by this striking opening paragraph of an article about our latest Prime Minister, Andy Burnham. The author I will not name, to spare her blushes, but the paper it was published in was the Guardian. Here it is:
“This is a vulnerable confession, but I spend way too much time on the social media of the New York City mayor, Zohran Mamdani. Whether he is seemingly effortlessly speaking Mandarin, hanging out with kids or charmingly accepting that he should wear a cycle helmet, the man with the million-watt smile is my antidepressant. (Even more vulnerable confession: I believe, irrationally, he is looking after my elder son, who lives there.)”
Reader, I was moved to nausea. Not since the heady days of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party have I seen such cringe-inducing sycophancy. But whereas the love for Magic Grandpa was more ideological than physical, the paragraph quoted above has something a little more carnal about it; not sexual, but more in the nature of a schoolgirl crush. To which one can only say: love, he isn’t going to notice you. And besides, he’s already married – to a woman, as it happens, who liked social media posts celebrating the October 7 massacre as “collective liberation” and claiming that reports of sexual violence on that day were hoaxes.
I’m trying to think of the last time I had a crush, of any kind, on a politician. I remember thinking Virginia Bottomley (remember her?) a fine-looking woman, but this was never going to translate into a vote for her or her party. I used to think Ken Livingstone was a fine politician until he went bananas; once, while in the House of Commons lobby, I saw someone I thought I knew, and waved at him; it turned out to be Livingstone, whom I didn’t know at all, but at least he waved back, which was sweet of him.
Anyway, Mamdani, he of the million-watt smile. I have some skin in this game, for I am a dual US/UK citizen, and regard New York City as my second spiritual home – or I did, until he got elected.
I wonder whether I’d have voted for him if I was living in New York. For although I cannot conceive of any circumstances under which I would vote Republican, there is something about him I find off-putting. It’s hard to put my finger on it, but try this: in composing a panel of 18 NYC lawyers to oversee judicial appointments, he managed to do so without choosing a single Jew. This is, statistically speaking, quite fantastic: the odds against it, assuming that 30 per cent of NYC lawyers are Jewish (this is the lowest estimate; some say it’s 50 per cent), are less than one in 500. If we say 50 per cent are Jewish, that figure slumps to one in 250,000. I don’t think Mamdani is a gambling man, but if he ever went to the track and I was behind him at the queue for the bookies, I’d be looking over his shoulder to see which horse he was betting on.
Another thing: when his office issued a map of New York City and its ethnic enclaves around the time of the World Cup, it included areas called “Little Palestine” and “Little Egypt”, but did not mention anything about Jews (or Irish, or Italians). I’ve been going to New York since I was an infant and I’d never heard of these places until then.
These problems only arose after he was elected, but there were plenty of warning signs before: his support for BDS, his declaration that his support for Palestine was “crucial” to his identity, his somewhat eyebrow-raising statement that “we have to make clear that when the boot of the NYPD is on your neck, it’s been laced by the IDF.” I think this refers to the fact that some NYPD officers took part in law-enforcement exchanges in Israel, especially after 9/11, focused on counterterrorism and mass casualty attacks, but it’s a rather emotive way of putting it, no? And so on and so on.
Why should this matter? We’re thousands of miles away. But I think we should be worried. The Green Party may be slipping in the polls, but they’re not done yet, and all it will take for them to get a full head of steam up again will be for Andy Burnham to do something which enrages the anti-Israel faction of the Labour Party, and they are fairly easy to enrage.
The problem is that antizionism, which is a polite word for antisemitism, is now baked into the politics of both the hard left and the hard right, and it doesn’t take a great leap to imagine those attitudes seeping into the centre. And if this can happen in the most Jewish city on earth outside of Israel, it can happen everywhere, and all it will take is someone with a million-watt smile and the ability to hang out with kids and wear a cycle helmet. I suppose speaking Mandarin effortlessly is too high a bar for a British politician.
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