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Jonathan Freedland

ByJonathan Freedland, Jonathan Freedland

Opinion

The talk of betrayal and treachery over Brexit strikes an especially gloomy chord in Jews

The hunt for traitors and unpatriotic elites never ends well for us, writes Jonathan Freedland

April 4, 2019 09:07
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3 min read

Not many conversations linger in the mind more than two decades later, but one I had long ago with a fellow resident of this slot has never faded from memory. It was with Daniel Finkelstein — not yet a peer of the realm — when I was a newcomer to the Guardian’s opinion pages and he was chief of staff to the then Conservative leader, William Hague.

We talked through the politics of the day, including the impossibility of the task he and his boss faced in opposing the then unassailable Tony Blair, but soon we got onto our own political stories. How on earth, I wondered, was he a Tory? How could a Jewish boy like him — like us — sit with that lot?

My puzzlement was less ideological than cultural. I pictured the Conservative party as a tribe rooted in Eton College, in chilly country houses and the rural shires, in families who had — to adapt Ed Miliband’s memorable phrase, contrasting his own roots with those of David Cameron — sat under the same oak tree for 500 years. Surely that was an uncomfortable, alien world for the Jewish child of immigrants?

I explained that, to my mind, it was the Labour party of my father and grandfather, the party that had vied with the Communists for the support of the Jewish East End, the party of Ian Mikardo and Manny Shinwell, that felt like the natural home for Jews like us.