The act of kindness that took my breath away

Published in the Evening Standard 30 March 2006

So I’m in a convenience store in west London. I’m in a hurry, scouring the shelves for Calpol, because my son has a temperature, when I hear a commotion by the cash till.

“No, come on. You can’t do that,” says a young woman.
“Just get on with it,” comes the reply.

The voices are raised. I assume there’s trouble. I get closer, to see what’s going on.

There’s a huddle of maybe ten people at the front, facing the shopkeeper. All have their heads bowed and seem to be concentrating deeply.

“Come on, you too.” Standing at the side is a man, perhaps in his fifties, who seems to be taking charge. I wonder if this is how a siege begins. He gives some money to the shopkeeper and then hands me a piece of paper: a set of three Lotto scratchcards.

“Get on with it. You have to do it here.”

Baffled, I look up at the shopkeeper, seeking an explanation. He smiles as if to say, ‘Humour him.’ I realise everyone inside, customers who walked in as randomly as I did, has got the same treatment: we have all been given, free of charge, our own chance to win a fortune.

I also realise that I’m not going to get out of the shop, still less buy any Calpol, unless I first take out a coin and scratch away. I’m a scratchcard virgin and it takes me a while to work out if I’ve done well or badly, but that seems no impediment. The other customers in the shop – two teenage girls, an elderly man, a family with a young boy – simply hand their cards to the man at the till, who checks them on his machine.

“Twenty pounds!” he declares, handing me a purple note.

“Well, obviously I can’t accept it,” I say. But the man who paid for the cards insists: those are the rules. The teenage girls nod.

“Well, let me share it,” I reply, waving it in his direction. He takes this as an insult; the shopkeeper scowls. I want to split the proceeds with the rest of our little group, but they shake their heads: I’m breaking the spirit of the exercise.

By now they’re distracted: the boy has won six pounds. Our benefactor is so delighted he buys another wad, costing him #30 – and proceeds to hand them to a new wave of bemused customers.

I seize the moment to buy the Calpol. The shopkeeper tells me not to be worried by my good fortune; the man has plenty of money. So much that he plays this little game regularly. We smile in shared disbelief, I thank everyone again and leave – smiling some more.

I find myself thinking of the old bumper sticker: Practise random kindness and senseless acts of beauty. Because everything about this had been random: from my walking into that shop at that moment, to my ticket with a winning line. But what it made it so unusual, what made it thrilling, was the sheer generosity of his action. A stranger had randomly spread about good fortune, at considerable cost, and for no reason other than that it gave him pleasure.

I find his conduct utterly intriguing. Our society, and not just ours, devotes enormous energies to understanding evil: Hollywood movies probe into the minds of serial killers, people lap up fiction which deals in horror and mayhem. Yet to my mind, just as baffling and mysterious is pure goodness. If extreme malevolence is fascinating and inexplicable so, surely, is extreme virtue.

That’s partly what led me to write The Righteous Men, which comes out this week under the pseudonym Sam Bourne. It’s a thriller, whose story turns, in part, on some unexpected and extraordinary acts of goodness. I regarded this aspect of the project as a particular challenge: would it be possible to write a thriller, a genre in which the action is usually fuelled by bombs and bullets, where a key element would be the deeds of those who do good?

I set about imagining the acts of extreme righteousness which feature in the book, taking inspiration for several of them from events in the real world. Last week yielded another real-life example that would have fitted in perfectly. On Sunday it emerged that one of the Conservatives’ mystery backers was a Swedish sports equipment tycoon, Johan Eliasch, who had lent the party #1m. But Eliasch had been in the news a few days earlier, for spending #8m buying up his own 400,000-acre chunk of Amazon rainforest – for the sole purpose of preventing logging companies cutting down the trees. “The Amazon is the lung of the world,” he explained. “It provides 20% of the world’s oxygen and 30% of the fresh water.”

There is something compelling about such an act; it challenges every assumption we have about human self-interest and the cynical pursuit of profit. Just like my man with the scratchcards.

And everyone can think of similar, if smaller examples. The wallet handed in with all the cash still intact or the motorist who stops to help you change a tyre. I once left my briefcase on a street: the couple who found it searched inside, tracked me down and got it back to me.

Such an experience leaves you feeling better about your fellow human beings, for sure, but also better about the place you live in. Nothing belies London’s image as a hard-edged city faster than one of those random acts of kindness – and they happen every day.

There are ways to nurture that spirit. I’m particularly keen on those schemes which encourage people to leave a book for someone else to pick up – or even to do the same with bicycles, dotted around the city. Failing that, we can all perform our own irrationally good deeds – and then just sit back and marvel at the sheer, wonderful mystery of it.

The Righteous Men by Sam Bourne is published by HarperCollins, #10.

What's in a pseudonym?

Why do writers take noms de plume? Jonathan Freedland explains his decision to publish his latest book under an assumed name

Read the full article from the Guardian's G2 section

The sleeping warrior

Kadima suffered from the loss of its founder, Ariel Sharon, leading to a disappointing night for Israeli moderates and progressives.

Read the post-election posting on the Guardian blog

Israelis have at last endorsed the gradual return of a stolen inheritance

The planned unilateral borders cannot stand, but Olmert needs support - because some withdrawal is better than none

Read the full article on the Guardian's website

Beyond, the fringe

The media say the Israeli elections are dull, but we are about to witness the eclipse of Likud and all it stands for.

Read the posting on the Guardian's blog

Last chance for a royal folly

Despite this week's scathing report from the Commons public expenditure committee, the Diana memorial fountain could still be a success - if it pays for itself

Published in the Evening Standard 23 March 2006

In a way, yesterday was ideal for a visit to the Diana Memorial Fountain. It was so bone-chillingly cold, there was hardly anyone about – allowing the dozen or so spectators (most of them American tourists) to have the water sculpture all to themselves. They could stroll around the oval channel in Hyde Park undisturbed by crowds or noise, “thinking about their lives, thinking about Diana,” just as the designer, Kathryn Gustafson said she intended.

Several seemed pleasantly surprised by what they found. Despite the House of Commons public accounts committee, which this week condemned the memorial in a scathing report as “ill-conceived and ill-executed,” there was praise for it. “I think it’s wonderfully simple and direct,” said Craig Shelter, from Philadelphia. Barbara Herod, in from Gloucestershire, reckoned the fountain had been unfairly maligned. “I think it’s lovely. I love the dynamics of the water, the noise of it.”

It was hard to argue. The babble of the artificial stream, sometimes flowing slowly, sometimes like a rapid, is a pleasing sound in the centre of a London park. As we spoke, beams of winter sunlight reflected on the water. For a moment, the carpings of the MPs committee - “This so called water feature will literally be a drain on the resources of the Royal Parks Agency for years to come,” said the Tory chairman Edward Leigh – seemed like the grumblings of a few spoilsport misers.

But most days will not be like yesterday. Come the summer, the numbers will grow – perhaps not to the 5,000 an hour that came when the memorial first opened and which so overwhelmed Parks staff, that the site had to be closed two weeks after it opened – but grow they will. And looking around yesterday, I saw little to convince that trouble won’t strike again.

Everyone knows the litany of woes that befell the fountain; they have entered the capital’s folk memory. Within 24 hours of the official unveiling by the Queen in July 2004, leaves bunged up the works, prompting an overflow of water, turning the surrounding grass into a mudbath. Later that same month, three people who had been paddling in the water – just as Gustafson had said they should - slipped and injured themselves. The culprit: algae growing on the stonework. At the start of 2005, the memorial was closed again, for five months of repairs.

You can see the results. Now a fence surrounds the fountain, one apparently made of green plastic and which might well have been bought at Homebase. To avoid the mudslide problem, a Tarmac-style path hugs the sculpture at several bends. New turf has been laid which, we’re told, functions like the grass on football pitches, draining water efficiently – stopping what was meant to look like a meadow from turning into a bog. This week, though, came word of new problems, with reports of hairline cracks between some of the 545 blocks of Cornish granite.

Managers insist the first woes, at least, are solved. Now the rules tell visitors that they should “Feel free to sit on the side and paddle your feet or hands.” They hope there’ll be no repeat of the scenes that first summer, when burly South African security guards had to patrol this area of contemplation and reflection, telling children to stay the hell out of the water.

Even if the fountain does shake off its initial bad luck, I’m not sure it’s worth the astronomic costs revealed by the public accounts committee. Already £2.2m over its initial £3m budget, maintenance costs have doubled from a planned £120,000 to £250,000 a year. With finite resources, that means the Royal Parks will have to spend less on recreational facilities elsewhere in order to find the £25m needed to maintain the Diana fountain over the course of the century.

Put like that, it hardly sounds a good deal. The Diana memorial is not hideous, it’s not an eyesore or a monstrous carbunkle on the face of Hyde Park. It’s pleasant. Try hard enough and you can even divine a symbolic reflection of the woman herself. The water flows in opposite directions, a reminder perhaps of the conflicting currents in the personality of the late princess. At the top of the slope, the stream cascades down a short flight of steps, reminiscent of the long train on Diana’s bridal dress, as she ascended the steps of St Pauls for her wedding. And if all that sounds too churningly pretentious, you can just see it as a nice spot for an afternoon picnic.

But none of that is good enough to justify the enormous flood of money this project has already swallowed – and will continue to drain for years to come.

There are two realistic options. The first is to find an alternative source of funds. Last May the Royal Parks Foundation floated the idea of seeking sponsorship for the sites in their care, which range from Speaker’s Corner to the sports fields in Regent’s Park. Of course, we would all balk at the prospect of gross advertising hoardings or corporate logos, but there is another way.

A few years back, there was a row when the watchdogs of Diana’s memory allowed Flora margarine to use her likeness on their products. Why not do a simple trade: if a company agrees to foot the bill for the Diana fountain they can have limited rights to the Diana image (so long as they stick to certain guidelines on taste and tackiness). That way, the Diana memorial could truly pay for itself.

If that doesn’t work, there’s a more drastic choice. We can see how things go this summer, see if the crowds come, see if children can follow their instincts and play with the water without causing a disaster. If they can, fine. If they cannot, and things go wrong again, it will be time to stop throwing good money after bad. Give the Diana fountain one more chance: if it fails then, shut it down for good.

No longer is his main rival the man next to him

Front page commentary on Gordon Brown's 10th Budget, on the Guardian's website

Blair's luck has run out - and he has no one to blame but himself

Three years of conflict in Iraq has corroded public trust in every aspect of his premiership, both domestic and foreign

Read the full article on the Guardian website

Nine years is too long

The Guardian is right to call for Tony Blair to go. If anything, we might have waited too long.

Read the posting on the Guardian's new weblog

Let's keep the West End's fizz

Published in the Evening Standard March 16 2006

Well, I'm feeling king of hill, top of the heap, A-number-one, because last week I got to see the new Sinatra show at the Palladium. The critics didn't like it much and I can see why: there is something fundamentally weird about watching a show with a missing star. The live swing band and troupe of dancers gave it all they've got, but they couldn't really hide the fact that the heart of this show is a series of TV screens - projecting a lead performer who is quite literally two-dimensional and, lest we forget, dead.

Still, I'm such a Sinatra fan that I enjoyed it. The songs are classics, his interpretations of them flawless; just to hear them loud and in a theatre was a thrill. Wisely, the producers preferred Trilby Sinatra to Toupee Sinatra, relying on the early Cole Porter gems and keeping the middle-aged, My Way bombast to a minimum. Despite the reviews, the audience is undeterred: the show took £2m before opening night and is booked up till midsummer.

Since leaving the Palladium though, I've had two things on my mind. The first is Sinatra's perfect, aching rendition of One for My Baby, a melody I can't seem to shake. The other is a thought about the state of West End theatre.

For Sinatra is just the latest in what is now a whole sub-genre: shows crafted from the back catalogues of much-loved artists of the past. Mamma Mia pays tribute to Abba at the Prince of Wales; We Will Rock You resuscitates Queen at the Dominion, while Sinatra appears again alongside Sammy Davis Jr and Dean Martin in The Rat Pack at the Savoy. Coming soon are Motown favourites in Dancing in the Streets at the Aldwych, Billy Joel's Movin' Out at the Apollo and Boney M's Daddy Cool at the Shaftesbury. (I can just about imagine a storyline crafted around Just the Way You Are and Honesty, but pity the scriptwriter who has to conjure a narrative link between Brown Girl in the Ring and Ra-Ra-Rasputin.)

There is something dispiriting about this reduction of the West End to a Greatest Hits theme park, especially when you add those shows which are movie spin-offs, like Fame and Footloose, or revivals of tried, tested and familiar winners like Evita, returning to the Adelphi in June. Tourists flock to Disneyland to experience 'real-life' versions of beloved films, from Snow White to the Incredibles. But is that really what we want from the West End?

Of course, some of these shows are outstandingly good: I cheered for The Producers, while both Billy Eliot and The Lion King won universal raves - and all three began life in the cinema. It's true too that the West End still has some straight plays of substance, whether it's Jeremy Irons in Embers, Woody Harrelson in Night of the Iguana, Kathleen Turner in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? or last year's acclaimed production of Schiller's Don Carlos. But these feel like exceptions, green shoots of activity peeking out between the concrete slabs of the musical blockbusters.

What's missing, even among these shows, are productions that are neither revivals of proven classics, nor vehicles for big-name stars, usually imported from Hollywood. It's the new work that's getting squeezed out. If the current trend continues, the West End might well remain a magnet for tourists and coach parties - but it will lose its lustre as a world-class artistic centre.

It's not difficult to explain how this has happened. The chief culprit are the high rents charged by theatres for the use of their space. As the Standard's theatre critic Nicholas de Jongh puts it: "The costs for independent producers coming to the West End are simply far too high." A Lloyd Webber show is fine; it can recover its costs. Similarly, a play first produced outside London, in a subsidised regional theatre, also has a fighting chance: some of its costs have already been met. But to set out to do new work in the West End can be economically prohibitive. Independent producers will go to Sheffield or Leeds or Birmingham first, leaving the West End for those big-money shows which are little more than compilation tapes on stage.

There is a close parallel here with the changing face of London's high streets, the subject of the campaign launched by the Standard this week. Just as too many one-off, independent retailers - the family-run bakery, the quirky record store - are being squeezed out by Tesco and Starbucks, so new and experimental drama is being chased out of the West End. In both cases, the issue is high rents - too high for all but the corporate behemoths. The result is that, while our neighbourhoods are turning into clonetowns, the West End risks becoming a parade of glorified jukeboxes, one just like another, offering nothing more than harmless, nostalgic fun.

What's the solution? A kneejerk response is to revive the tired argument about subsidised vs commercial theatre, as if only a state handout could level the playing field that might enable artistic innovators to compete. I think there are more imaginative solutions. We could decide that the big West End auditoriums represent a national (or even city) asset and decide the state (or London) should own them the way it now owns museums. It could then rent them out, varying the rates it charges in order to ensure a diversity of theatrical fare was on offer. That might be particularly relevant for some of the smaller spaces, like The Fortune, Duchess, St Martin's and Ambassadors theatres which, de Jongh suggests, could become a new Off West End, to rival New York's Off-Broadway.

Or we could simply join the demand of those fighting to stop London's streets turning into clone city: a change in the law to keep a lid on rents, so that smaller players can survive. As Frank himself might have put it: It's up to you, London, London.

Enough of this cover-up: the Wilson plot was our Watergate

It seems fantastic now, but 30 years ago there really was a plot to carry out a coup d'etat against a British prime minister

Read the full article on the Guardian website

End this absurd practice

Allowing the prime minister to choose members of the Lords is undemocratic.

Read the full posting on the Guardian's weblog

'Bored of deputies' is not enough

Published in the Jewish Chronicle 10 March 2006

In the competitive world of childcare and nursery schooling, a key boast is the teacher-pupil ratio: the more adults there are to look after the children, the better. If the ratio is as good as, say, one to four, then you know you’re in safe hands.

Well, now our community bigwigs have gone one better. Last week, the Jewish Leadership Council — a 20-strong committee of Anglo-Jewry’s greatest and goodest — announced that it had at last put itself on a democratic footing. No longer could this group be branded a self-appointed, secretive and unaccountable clique of grandees: its seven-member executive had now been elected, fair and square.

Who were the electorate for this admirable exercise in fair and open democracy? Why, the JLC itself. Or rather only those 13 members of it who are heads of key Jewish organisations (rather than the additional seven individuals “chosen for their expertise”).

Put simply, an electorate of 13 voted for an executive of seven. That’s less than two voters for every person elected, a ratio that not even the most exclusive kindergarten could match. Oh, and every single one of those elected was unopposed — a style of election that is handy for those involved and which is, I’m told, particularly popular in North Korea.

I shouldn’t mock. Advocates of the JLC insist that those 13 are, if not directly elected by the organisations they lead, then at least accountable to them. They can plausibly claim to represent the community and therefore have some right, in turn, to choose an inner-circle of leaders. What’s more, several on the executive are people — like Trevor Chinn and Gerald Ronson — who have long served as de facto community leaders, except with no mechanism of accountability whatsoever.

These are the elders, once memorably dubbed the Funding Fathers, who have traditionally bankrolled much Anglo-Jewish activity, and won key decision-making power as a result. Now, say JLC optimists, these movers and shakers will move and shake under an organisational umbrella, where the rest of us will be able to see what they’re up to.

What’s more, the JLC will be the place where this old guard can gradually hand over to the next generation of communal leaders, a process that otherwise might not have happened at all.

Not that that was why the JLC was created. No, the emotion that fuelled this new body was despair. Our communal top brass had spent decades tearing its collective hair out in frustration at the state of what is meant to be British Jews’ central authority: the Board of Deputies.

While there’s great personal respect for the current president, Henry Grunwald — who also leads the JLC — and indeed his predecessors, too many key communal figures admit they’ve essentially given up on the Board as a functioning body.

“The Board is a bit of a joke,” says one head of a major Jewish organisation, with no axe to grind. Another asks: “Is the best way to run a community through monthly meetings of 400 people sitting in a parliament-style chamber, and then putting every decision through a dozen committees?”

He and others answered that question long ago, rejecting the Board as a relic, a structure that might have looked right in the 18th century but not now. They insist they tried to reform it, praising Grun-wald for his own efforts. But, they have concluded, the Board is all but unreformable, a body crippled by institutional inertia. Rather than keep banging their heads against the Board’s brick walls, they have preferred to sidestep the body altogether and set up a new one. The Board will be allowed to carry on doing “day-to-day” work, we’re told, while the JLC will deal with the big stuff.

I can see why all this makes great sense to those involved. I, too, would hardly fancy dedicating valuable hours of my life grappling with the unwieldy, creaky Board. And I can see why the move from a parliamentary model to a boardroom one is appealing: now decisions can be taken and acted upon at a rate slightly faster than glacial.

But a problem remains nonetheless. The Board of Deputies may have been an example of “democracy ad absurdum,” as one critic put it to me, but at least it is democratic. The new JLC’s claim to democracy is much vaguer and thinner.

I know it’s not easy to think of an alternative: how would you begin to organise a direct ballot of all British Jews, for example? But the JLC set-up, on its own, is not good enough. If this was any other aspect of British life, we would call it an unelected quango — and we would refuse to be led by it. Our Jewish lives should be no different.

The shocking truth behind shoot-to-kill

Panorama's investigation into the death of Jean Charles de Menezez leaves senior police chiefs with tough questions to answer

Published in the Evening Standard, 9 March 2006

No one will have enjoyed watching last night’s Panorama, which reconstructed the events leading to the police shooting last July of Jean Charles de Menezes. Not his family, who were shown bewildered by the death of a cherished son, a young man who had grown up in the dusty poverty of rural Brazil and who had come to London, like so many before him, to make his fortune – or rather enough money to send back home. Not the commuters who sat on the Tube at Stockwell that Friday morning, only to see an innocent man shot seven times before their eyes. And not Londoners, who for an hour last night were taken back to the tension and angst of that hot, fearful month.

But the most uncomfortable viewers will have been the police, whose conduct and serial mistakes on July 22 were laid bare so rigorously. The programme was made by Peter Taylor, a sober, meticulous journalist whose films on Northern Ireland have won universal acclaim: this was no police-bashing agitprop. On the contrary, running through it was a close understanding of the near-impossible situation the police found themselves in that day.

Nevertheless, the judgement it prompts is not kind. First, we learned that not once in the course of De Menezez’s 33-minute journey from Tulse Hill to Stockwell did the police stop or challenge him. Of course that would have been foolhardy when he was riding the bus, surrounded by other people: if he had been a suicide bomber, he could have blown himself up there and then. But why didn’t they stop him when he was on foot? From a distance, thereby protecting themselves, officers could have told him to freeze – even to undress, if that’s what it took to prove he carried no bomb. Perhaps he would have been humiliated, but he would be alive today – and none of us would know his name.

Second, we heard of the almost Keystone Kops incompetence that led police to be initially uncertain of the Brazilian’s identity and then to misidentify him as Hussein Osman, the man suspected of having left one of the previous day’s failed bombs at Shepherd’s Bush. Taylor stood up what many suspected was an urban myth: that the surveillance team missed the moment De Menezez left his flat that morning because the man charged with watching him had to take a leak. It turns out that man was an undercover soldier called Tango 10 – and he answered the call of nature when he should have been operating a video camera. Later a colleague radioed base to say he couldn’t confirm the suspect was Osman, but noted that he had distinctive “Mongolian eyes.”

Of course basic human errors are inevitable, especially in an operation like this one – scrambled together, on the hoof, with no time for preparation. But Panorama’s story featured more than error. There was also an allegation of criminal misconduct: the claim that Special Branch officers falsified the log recording the precise events of the day.

Nor can our masters shift the blame for July 22 onto incompetent or bent underlings. One of the key problems of the operation was that officers who entered Stockwell station had no way of communicating with their controllers back at Scotland Yard: their radios simply didn’t work underground. Former Met Commissioner John Stevens said he had previously lobbied the Home Office hard, demanding equipment that could do the job, but the government had dragged its feet. You’d think 7/7 would have changed all that, but no. Today’s police officers have hi-tech “Airwave” radios – but these still don’t work in the depths of the Tube system. The Home Office told Taylor contracts still have to be signed before the requisite infrastructure can be put in place. If ever there was proof that London needs greater power over its own affairs – so that the police, the Underground and the resources both need are under London’s own authority, no longer at the whim of central government – this, surely, is it.

More shocking still was the revelation that our specialist counter-terrorist forces are given greater leeway, and operate under looser rules of engagement, than the Israeli army. An Israeli police commander told Taylor his officers could only open fire on a suspected bomber if they could actually see a suicide vest or explosive belt. No such restriction operates on British firearms officers. If it did, De Menezez – who carried no bag and wore only a thin denim jacket – would not have been gunned down.

What it adds up to is a series of tough questions for this city’s most senior police officers, starting with the top man. Ian Blair will have to explain not only the series of missteps that took place on his watch, but the curious fact that he seemed to be one of the last to know that the Met had killed an innocent man – not till 24 hours after the shooting. He and his colleagues will have to face up to the findings of the Independent Police Complaints Commission, now being considered by the Crown Prosecution Service: they may even have to answer to a court, if that’s what the latter decides. That’s certainly what Jean Charles’s family want.

Others will have to draw the wider lessons. I hope they’ve already done so, whether it be ordering radios that work underground or adopting those more sensible Israeli rules of engagement.

Nevertheless, there is one principle that, despite the horror of Jean Charles de Menezez’s death, does not need to be reviewed: namely, that it is legitimate to take a life to save a life or lives. If police are certain – more certain than they were on July 22 – that they are looking at a ticking human bomb, poised to kill and maim, then they are right to do whatever it takes to stop him, even if that means shooting at the head. But that if is a big if – one that cost the life of an innocent man.

Forgiveness doesn't mean you have to love your husband's killer

In Northern Ireland and South Africa, justice has been sacrificed for peace, but to forgo revenge is a painful and admirable act

Read the full article on the Guardian's website

Stop playing with fire

The Mayor insists he is being accused of anti-Semitism simply because he is critical of Israel. This is a dangerous stance - and it is not in the interests of London

Published in the Evening Standard 2 March 2006

Ken Livingstone is back in his favourite position. For the third time in his career, he is the people's champion, cruelly shut out of power by undemocratic forces determined to thwart the popular will.

It happened in 1986, when Margaret Thatcher abolished the GLC rather than see Livingstone run it. It happened again in 2000 when Labour fiddled the system to deny him its candidacy for the London mayoralty. And it happened once more last week, when the Adjudication Panel for England, the key local government watchdog, suspended the mayor over his "unnecessarily insensitive" and "offensive" remarks to a Jewish reporter from this newspaper, whom he had likened to a concentration camp guard.

It is a remarkable hat-trick. Three times Ken has had the voters on his side, only to see his mandate denied. It's a plight that suits Ken's brand of populist politics perfectly: each time he has been able to cast himself as the victim, the plucky David up against an undemocratic Goliath.

And each time he has been right. Few would defend the abolition of the GLC now, and even Tony Blair admits he made a mistake trying to block Livingstone six years ago. And this latest decision is not much more defensible. On the essential point - that an elected official should only be removed from office by a vote of the electorate or if he has broken the law - the mayor has right on his side.

In his long statement this week, Ken was right about something else, too. He made the coherent case that the accusation of anti-semitism is bandied around too freely, hurled especially at those who are critical of Israel. He quoted one Jewish analyst who has said that the equation of criticism of Israeli policy with anti-semitism "drains the word anti-semitism of any useful meaning."

All of that is true, but it doesn't quite exonerate the mayor. For the encounter with Oliver Finegold of the Standard had nothing to with Israel: the word was not even mentioned. The Board of Deputies of British Jews has insisted from the beginning that its objection was simply to Livingstone's treatment of a Jewish reporter. Ken says he has "never believed a word of it"; as far he is concerned, the whole episode is merely an excuse for attacking a high-profile critic of Israel.

On this the mayor is badly - even dangerously - wrong. For one thing, plenty of people in the Jewish community who are neither great admirers of Israel nor friends of the Board of Deputies saw the hurtfulness of the mayor's remarks to Finegold. What I hear mentioned most is the mayor's failure to apologise or change tack, even once Finegold had told him he was Jewish and found it offensive to be compared to a German war criminal. Plenty of Jews cannot believe that if the mayor were confronted by, say, a black or Muslim or gay reporter who said they were similarly hurt, he would not have made amends immediately. This is a man who prides himself on his sensitivity to London's minorities - and yet, on that night outside City Hall, he trampled on a very raw Jewish nerve, for which he has never straightforwardly apologised. To repeat: one does not have to be pro-Israel or a creature of the Board of Deputies to be troubled by this.

Second, there is something wrong about the constant attempt to change the subject, typified in a piece the mayor wrote in the Guardian at the height of the row exactly a year ago, headlined "This is about Israel, not anti-semitism." This manoeuvre denies the right of Jews to object to prejudice in its own right, here in London, Britain or Europe - separate and distinct from the politics of the Middle East. For no insult is ever just an insult: it's always 'really about' Israel.

It works as a kind of mirror image of the very equation Livingstone rightly attacked, the lazy conflation of criticism of Israel with anti-semitism. The mayor ends up implying that what Jews regard as anti-semitism is often, in fact, mere opposition to Israel. In his own case, he seeks a kind of immunity from accusations of offence, even when, as in the Finegold affair, his actions are wholly unrelated to the Middle East: I can't possibly have hurt Jewish feelings, I'm merely a critic of Israel!

This leaves Jews in a very uncomfortable spot, for it implies that so long as Israel continues as an occupier and a violator of the human rights of Palestinians, then that's what accusations of anti-semitism will be 'really about.' The unspoken message is: when Israel behaves properly, then you can complain about anti-Jewish prejudice; until that day, you better keep your mouths shut.

Why is this dangerous? Because Ken's insistence that this is all about Israel turns him into a victim not of an unelected quango, but of a shadowy, powerful Israel lobby. That's certainly how he's seen by the more radical Islamist websites, who have already branded him "Palestine's Livingstone", as if the crime for which he has been punished is his support for the Palestinians.

A mayor of as diverse a city as London can't afford to start setting one community against another like this. For that is the inevitable result of this line of rhetoric, one that will pit Muslims against Jews. There was a hint of that competition in Livingstone's rather pointed note that, while a Jewish Londoner is three times more likely to suffer a racist attack than a "white European", an Arab is 11 times more likely. In the victim Olympics, he was handing Arabs and Muslims a gold medal - with the Jews told they were lagging behind.

Community relations are fragile enough in this city, without the mayor inflaming them more. He is one of the country's most skilled politicians; I still admire him. But right now he is playing with fire - and it is not just him who risks getting burned.

Without power of our own, we wait on the whims of politicians

The right to petition parliament directly would give people the chance of some real control over their lives

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