Way off base

The main parties' poor byelection results in Wales and Kent expose the peril of taking the core vote for granted.

Read the item on the Guardian blog

If the fountains run dry, fine the bosses

Published in the Evening Standard 29 June 2006

You’ve got to pity Richard Aylard, the luckless soul who serves as PR spokesman for Thames Water. Along with Saddam Hussein’s legal adviser and Tim Henman’s motivational coach, Aylard is engaged in desperate, doomed work. Like them, he has been saddled with a near-impossible task, paid to do what simply cannot be done.

For no-one could buff the public image of Thames Water, not given that company’s current record. The latest embarrassment is its announcement that, should it succeed in its application for a drought order, it will turn off the fountains in Trafalgar Square, along with the displays in Sloane Square and Somerset House. There’ll be no car-washes or window cleaning; public parks will go unwatered. The green parts of the capital will turn brown; the bubble and flow of one of the city’s best-known landmarks will turn to dust.

In other circumstances, Londoners would regret this news, but understand it. If they believed the well was genuinely running dry, they would willingly accept the strictures sought by Thames Water – along with the ban, already in place, on using hose pipes on their lawns. They would show the spirit of ’76, when the nation heeded the call to conserve water and bowed to the slogan of the summer: shower with a friend.

But this is not 1976. For one thing, back then people accepted as a matter of common sense that there was a drought on. Even as a nine year old boy, I could understand that nine straight, hot weeks without a drop falling from the sky might reduce our water supply. It’s not like that now: last month was one of the wettest Mays on record, and the winter hardly felt dry. The water companies are left explaining that groundwater levels are alarmingly low, but that’s something we cannot see for ourselves. We have to take it on trust.

And trust is the one thing the companies do not have. That’s chiefly because Thames tells us there’s a water shortage even as it loses nearly 900m litres of water every single day through leaking pipes. The first time I came across that statistic, I assumed it was a misprint. But no, I read it right. Thames loses a third of the water it puts into the system, enough to fill around 350 Olympic-sized swimming pools, every day of the week. Now, I’m no engineer, but even I can work out that if the pipes didn’t leak, we’d have plenty of water and there would be no drought – and no drought order, no hosepipe ban, no threatened stand-pipes. And the fountains of Trafalgar Square could gush all summer long.

It’s at this point that poor Richard Aylard pops up to tell us that, in fact, Thames Water is spending £500,000 a day repairing aged pipes, some of which are 150 years old. He says this is an enormous task, neglected for decades, and that the company is doing all it can.

You’re almost convinced when Thames go and spoil it all by announcing, as they did last week, that their pre-tax profits rose by 31% to a whacking £346.5m. That’s £346.5m that could have gone repairing leaks – but went into shareholders’ pockets instead. Nor are Mr Aylard’s efforts helped when Thames Water customers, and that includes most Londoners, open their bills to see prices have increased by well over 20%.

To put it simply, Thames Water are charging us the maximum they’re allowed, they’re raking in enormous profits – and yet they tell us we can’t water our gardens or wash our cars because there’s a shortage, when we know they’re frittering away nearly a billion litres of the stuff every day.

So it’s little wonder that the public are not pulling together, Blitz-style, to take whatever hardship Mother Nature wants to throw at us. Because we don’t blame Mother Nature: we blame Thames Water.

Is there a solution, besides raging, a la Victor Meldrew, at our wilting plants and dirty cars? The first move is to pressure the company to spend more fixing those repairs: at present, they’re spending less than half of what they make in profit. Such pressure is the proper task of Ofwat, the regulator. It’s been setting targets for leak-reduction to Thames, targets that the company has missed three years running.

Now it’s time for Ofwat to say enough is enough and to use the power it has. The severest penalty at its disposal is a fine of ten per cent of turnover. For Thames’s water business that would amount to £65m. (Under cirrent rules, that £65m would go straight to the Treasury: Gordon Brown should make his own gesture and ensure the cash is spent on pipe repairs.)

Ofwat is due to make its decision in the next fortnight: let’s hope it plays hard, perhaps even demanding that Thames pay back the extra cash it’s taken off consumers in return for repairs that haven’t happened.

That would at least send a message to the company that it has to change. It’s no good Aylard insisting that profits are essential, otherwise no investors would come forward to pay for the massive programme of repair work. Smart investors would know that in return for stumping up serious cash now, they would be on for big profits long into the future: after all, they will have monopoly control over a commodity everyone needs. Bets don’t get much safer than that.

And if Thames Water don’t get the message, there is another way. In Wales, water is provided by a not-for-profit company which either reinvests any financial surplus or pays it back to the consumer. Welsh Water has done that for the last two years, giving every household a £19 rebate on their last bill. And consumer groups say the quality of service has improved radically.

That Welsh model seems remote from London just now. But if the summer ends with standpipes on the streets, the demand for it could get louder – and Thames Water will find itself drowning, with few friends coming to the rescue.

Bosses make a huge difference, but politics, like football, is a team game

It is hard to look beyond the masochism strategies of Blair and Sven. Beware, however, the cult of leadership

Read the column on the Guardian website

Homeland Insecurity

A review of 'Failed States' by Noam Chomsky, published in the New York Times 25 June 2006

Making our Jewish identity public

Published in the Jewish Chronicle 23 June 2006

When I was at university, members of the Union of Jewish Students were encouraged to wear small badges, carrying three discreet little letters, all in lower case: ujs. It was the lapel equivalent of a whisper.

A few years later, I noticed that UJS members now wore T-shirts spelling out the organisation’s name in tall, wide letters, with the word JEWISH the largest of all, covering the wearer from the navel to the neck.

I took that to be a sign that the next generation of British Jews were willing to declare themselves more loudly and proudly than before. Where their parents had been wary of being too noticeable - unsure even about using the J-word too audibly in mixed company - these younger Jews were much bolder. In recent weeks, that hunch has been confirmed, though now with evidence rather more substantial than a T-shirt.

A cluster of new books has appeared in which young Jewish writers pursue overtly Jewish themes. Witness Naomi Alderman’s prize-winning debut novel, “Disobedience,” set among Hendon’s Orthodox community. Or the exquisite “Earl of Petticoat Lane,” a biography of his grandfather - an East End market trader who ended up mingling in London high society - by Andrew Miller, Moscow correspondent of the Economist.

Both Alderman and Miller were born in 1974. Coming soon is a book by TV documentary maker Dan Edelstyn, telling the story of his grandmother who fled the Kiev of the Russian Revolution only to die years later as a converted Catholic, buried among IRA volunteers in the Falls Road cemetery, Belfast. Edelstyn is 29.

There have of course been books about Jewish subjects before. And the forebears of Ms Alderman, for one, are hardly bashful when it comes to identifying Jewishly (see the column directly above this one). Even so, it’s hard not to sense something afoot - an ease about “outing” oneself as a Jew that did not exist in the same way 30 or 40 years ago.

Some of that is simply the confidence that comes with feeling settled and accepted, a comfort not always available to our forebears. But the emerging works of non-fiction at least also suggest a desire to excavate a past our parents and grandparents preferred to keep buried.

In “Remind Me Who I Am, Again,” Linda Grant captured well the initial immigrant desire simply to scratch out a living and survive. Their children, in turn, wanted to advance as far as they could, with little interest in looking back. It has been left to the grandchildren, my own generation, to pause, take stock and remember.

That impulse is not only nostalgic and sentimental, though there is some of that. It is also about the flipside of today’s confidence, a kind of uncertainty about the world and our place in it. That definitely played a part in my own family memoir, “Jacob’s Gift.” It was not solely an account of the lives of three individuals, it was also an inquiry into identity and belonging - both of which have become vexed and confused in today’s globalised world.

Andrew Miller’s book is mainly a lovingly detailed, rich description of a remarkable man - but it is also a reflection on Englishness, class and the surprising fluidity of British life, accepting newcomers more readily than we might suppose.

For his day job, Miller writes about the big questions of high politics and international affairs. Yet when he came to write a book, it was not a biography of Vladimir Putin or a study of the Russian economy that drew him: it was the life story of his own grandfather.

I understand that feeling. Something similar was at work when I chose to research the lives of my mother and two great-uncles: a sense both that identity is one of the great issues of our times and that, somehow, the lives of “ordinary” individuals can tell you more about the world than any number of abstract inquiries into “society.”

Both Miller and I were lucky. One great-uncle of mine left behind a stack of letters; another had been interviewed two dozen times and made sure he kept copies of the tapes. Miller’s grandfather “kept everything: letters, diaries, photographs, address books, invitations, business ledgers and notes scribbled to himself on the backs of envelopes… a musty record of how… he became an Englishman.”

That leaves a troubling thought. In the age of email, we do not write letters, let alone keep them. Our addresses are stored on SIM cards and on databases. We take countless photographs and video recordings, but store them in places and on formats our grandchildren may have no idea how to use. If, in two generations’ time, our grandchildren show as much interest in us as, apparently, we do in our predecessors, where will they start? How will they have any idea what we were like?

“Jacob’s Gift” is now out in paperback (Penguin, £8.99)

We dare not let our future look like this

London's rate of recycling is the worst among Europe's major cities. Without change, the sheer volume of trash threatens to engulf us all

Published in the Evening Standard 22 July 2006

I don’t suffer from obsessive compulsive disorder in any area of my life – except one. I do not ensure my Coke cans are all in a straight line, like David Beckham. I do not wash my hands repeatedly, as, we’re told, is the habit of Steven Gerrard.

But I am a fanatic when it comes to recycling. If I spot so much as a crumpled envelope or a faded receipt, I’ll march it straight to the green bin. I’ll flatten orange juice cartons and egg boxes, anything which has even the remotest relationship to paper. Tins and glass get the same treatment, rinsed and dumped in the green box. My zealotry is such that if I see a crushed can on our street, I don’t just curse the litter louts who left it – I find my right hand twitching, desperate to pick up the debris and hurl it towards its proper, green home.

Why am I like this? It can’t be a Bree Van De Kamp desire for regimented order: anyone looking at my desk, its entire surface space covered by wobbling piles of paper, knows that’s not me. No, it’s not an anal need for neatness that does it, just a single visual memory. Several years ago I saw a wide, panoramic photograph of a landfill dump – and the sight horrified me. The idea that we are digging vast, crater-sized holes in the ground and filling them with plastic bags stuffed with rotten, suppurating rubbish was so awful, it seemed a straightforward, moral imperative that we reduce the amount of trash we bury. Carry on as we are, and we will poison the ground beneath our feet.

The alternative is to burn our garbage, but that’s hardly an improvement, filling the atmosphere with smoke and fumes, to say nothing of carbon emissions. Which is why last week’s government decision to go ahead with the Belvedere incineration plant in Bexley was so roundly condemned by green groups.

No, the only solution is not to bury or burn, but to recycle. And on this London’s record is appalling. When it comes to recycling by local authorities, the capital is bottom of the national league table: we recycle just 15% of our waste. Among Europe’s major cities, London is the very worst.

Of course it would help if more of us developed a compulsive behaviour disorder that made us drop every possible item in the green box rather than the black bin bag. But even that doesn’t get to the heart of the matter. That comes down to a single word: plastic.

Plastic is the stubborn item that refuses to be recycled; in my house it’s the plastic – almost all of it packaging –
that fills up the bins. Paper, tin and glass are fine; old food scraps can go for compost. But plastic won’t go anywhere.

What to do about it? The obvious solution is to find ways to recycle it. My own borough, Hackney, have now set up bottle banks where you can dump the plastic. But experience shows that won’t have an impact till it’s part of the regular, doorstep service. Asking us to make a special journey is asking for a monastic virtue few of us have.

Instead, we should tackle this problem at source. That’s why the Women’s Institute deserve three loud choruses of Jerusalem for their latest campaign, against supermarket packaging.

You don’t have to be Victor Meldrew to shake your head in disbelief at the amount of plastic, polystyrene and cling film that comes into the house with a single, weekly shop. Why, you say, your voice rising, do four pears need to be packed as if they are were a rare Faberge egg on loan to the Louvre?

The supermarkets would reply that, if they did not coddle their avocados and apples like precious gems, they would get bashed and bruised and we, the consumers, would reject them. And on this, they have a point. If we were more willing to buy fruit and veg with knocks and scars, the shops would not waste so much plastic protecting them.

We need to send that message to the supermarkets. And there are other businesses which need to hear it, too. Why, to take one example, do Starbucks and many of the other coffee chains insist on selling their iced, Frappucino drinks in plastic cups? If paper will do for a hot drink, why not for a cold one? If you want to do your bit for the planet, that could be a small start. Add to the list of specifications – Grande, skinny, decaff etc – a request for a paper cup. See if it catches on. (While you’re at it, ask why Pret and other sandwich bars don’t provide green bins for all the cans they generate.)

In the end, though, we probably won’t act until waste hits us in our pockets. Ireland has experimented with a tax on plastic supermarket shopping bags, forcing customers to reuse them. Meanwhile, Sir Michael Lyons, the civil servant reviewing local government funding, has proposed a black bin bag tax, so that homeowners pay more the more sacks of non-recyclable trash they leave out. It happens on the continent already, with Germans paying 18p a kilo, the Belgians 70p per bag.

Inevitably, politics will intrude. Right now, the Mayor is keen to take overall charge of waste management in the city – collecting it and getting rid of it. Most boroughs are wary, reluctant to let go of one of the few clear powers they have. That leaves the burden of proof on them, to prove they can get their act together and come up with a strategy that will serve the whole city. If they don’t, they will soon face huge EU fines, as London fails to come into line with European standards on recycling.

This is one of those problems that can’t be dumped in one place: it’s up to all of us, politicians, companies and individuals. And it’s not one we can bury, hoping it will just go away.

A losers' summit

Experienced, with an undisputed grasp of policy issues and reputation for cerebral heft. Could Gordon Brown be the Al Gore of British politics?

Read the item on the Guardian blog

What Gordon Brown is planning for his first hundred days in No 10

The next prime minister has spent years preparing for office, and he's sure to make at least one radical move very early on

Read the full article on the Guardian website

Citizen Gates

Once a hate figure for anti-capitalists and internet idealists, Bill Gates has promised to give away 95% of his wealth. Britain's super-rich should take note.

Read the item on the Guardian weblog

Why Sir Ian should answer to the Mayor

London's policing needs to be more responsive to voters to avoid the problems now plaguing the Met

Published in the Evening Standard 15 June 2006

Blair's had yet another "worst week," and there will be more to come. No not Tony - though he's had enough "worst weeks" to fill a year - but Sir Ian, whose tenure as Britain's most senior policeman has seemed jinxed from the start.

He's on the rack over last week's raid at Forest Gate and on the incident's pre-echo, the Stockwell shooting in July 2005. In both cases armed police shot an innocent man, wrongly convinced that he was a murderous terrorist. Both episodes have fed the double charge against the Met that it is either racist in its trigger-happy pursuit of anyone who looks, in the words of satirist John O'Farrell "vaguely dusky," or grossly incompetent - or both.

The result for Blair is fierce criticism from left and right. The former cannot forgive the commissioner the excessive display of force he deployed last week, sending 250 armed men to Forest Gate, and they are ready to pounce on whatever slamming the Independent Police Complaints Commission delivers to Blair when its much-leaked report into the killing of Jean Charles de Menezes is finally published.

Yet Sir Ian has few friends on the right. Traditional allies of the police have long seen Blair as the plod who's too PC, a limp-wristed liberal more anxious to make the police a politically correct service than a crime busting force. They don't like his reforms - hiring more women and ethnic minorities - and would be glad to see the back of him.

The result is a commissioner who is lonely and exposed. The ordure is falling on him daily, from a great height and from all sides, and he is having to take most of it on his own. He looks around and sees no-one behind him.

Or rather he sees everyone. Technically, he is a servant of the crown, appointed by the government in the form of the Home Secretary, yet also under the wing of the Metropolitan Police Authority (MPA), with a nod to the mayor of London. "Nominally he is answerable to lots of people; in practice that means he's not really accountable to anybody," says one official who stands in the middle of this institutional muddle. It translates into a black hole, with few Londoners sure of the Commissioner's exact authority. And that has a practical meaning. When a police officer tells you or me to stand back, in whose name is he acting? What authority, precisely, does he have?

The solution, the only one in a democracy, has to be politics. The legitimacy of the police has to flow from the legitimacy of an elected mandate. Now that could mean, as the Conservatives under Michael Howard proposed in the last election, the direct election of police chiefs, common practice already in several American cities. But for those who recoil at the thought of policemen touting for votes - doubtless promising ever tougher crackdowns at election time - there is another way. The Commissioner could simply be appointed directly by a politician with a mandate of his own.

No, that's not a call for the Met to come under the operational control of John Reid. Such a move would smack of the national police force Britain has historically avoided; it would also reek of state control of policing, a set-up rightly deemed alien to our democratic culture.

The candidate for the job is much more obvious and closer to home. The Metropolitan police should come under the democratically elected leader of the metropolis: the mayor.

That's long been Ken Livingstone's preference: hardly a surprise that, given the choice, Ken would like to have more power. But he's not been pushing that demand too loudly of late. He's far cannier than that. Indeed, he has played recent events brilliantly. Somehow he has retained his status as the admired ally of London's Muslim community - many of whom are feeling deep anger at the police - while simultaneously emerging as the staunchest backer of the Met. He is best pals with both Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi and Sir Ian Blair: quite a feat.

All of which is smart politics for Ken. But his backing for the Commissioner gives us a taste of what could also be smart practice for this city. The mayor should be the Commissioner's boss - and also his chief advocate. That's how it works in New York, where the mayor appoints the top cop, takes the political heat for him at moments of stress - and sacks him if he screws up.

Such a move is long overdue. And it would have three rapid benefits. First, the police's corner would be defended by someone who knows how to do it. Witness the woeful televised apology by assistant commissioner Andy Hayman to the Forest Gate brothers: Ken would have known how to do it properly. Second, the police would operate day to day with the clout of a democratic mandate behind them, rather than with the nervous uncertainty that characterises too much of their activity today. Third, they would have to sharpen up their act because the mayor's electoral prospects would depend on it. Remember, elections are to democracy what competition is to capitalism: they improve performance.

Could it happen? The government will be reluctant: handing over the Met to Ken means ceding control over a slew of national responsibilities, from protection of the Queen to state visits. And there is no practical way to peel those duties away from the core London work of the Met. But that needn't be an obstacle. Let City Hall run the lot, even those national tasks: after all, it can boast a better record of efficiency than the Home Office.

More likely is a reform to the MPA, allowing Ken to appoint the chair, much as he does now with Transport for London. That would be a step in the right direction, but ministers, currently reviewing the mayor's powers, should be bolder. They should realise that the ultimate say over the policing of London belongs with the man Londoners choose.

The Sun and John Reid are both right: these sentences do not fit the crime

A six-year minimum term for a man who sexually assaulted a three-year-old highlights the flaws at the heart of our justice system

Read the full article on the Guardian website

Club football is futile

I am that creature lacking in all credibility: the devotee of international football who finds the grind of the Premiership leaves him cold.

Read the full item on the Guardian's blog

Damned if they do - and damned if they don't

After the Forest Gate raid, those who urge Muslims not to co-operate with the Met are playing a dangerous game

Published in the Evening Standard June 8 2006

This must be Sir Ian Blair's second worst nightmare. The biggest fear of the Metropolitan Police Commissioner is of another 7/7. But he surely has long dreaded a repeat of the other London tragedy of July 2005: the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes, the suspected suicide bomber who turned out to be an innocent man riding the Tube to work.

Now, nearly one year on, it seems as if Sir Ian's men have made the same mistake again. In Forest Gate, 250 officers mounted a dawn raid on a house where intelligence told them terrorist brothers were making a lethal chemical device. One of the men inside was shot - and yet, so far, not so much as a chemical trace has been found.

The episode evokes a horrible sense of deja vu, as once again - just as they did after the de Menezes shooting - the Independent Police Complaints Commission pore over every step taken by the Met; lawyers for the affected family denounce the authorities; and, seamlessly, anti-war campaigners take up the case as their own.

In that last category, step forward Yvonne Ridley, the former Express journalist turned candidate for George Galloway's Respect party. Ridley, you'll remember, was briefly held captive by the Taliban in the lead up to the invasion of Afghanistan in September 2001 - only to emerge as a convert to Islam less than two years later. Students of Stockholm Syndrome - whereby hostages develop a strong attachment and even sympathy for their captors - might see here an interesting case study.

Ridley addressed a meeting in east London on Tuesday night, making headlines by calling on her fellow Muslims to withdraw all co-operation with the police, following the Forest Gate raid. No offering directions, no "passing the time of day" with a bobby on the beat - until the police "start showing some respect to the community."

Ridley softened that hard line in later interviews, but that scarcely rescued her from her mistake. She may well be right that the young Muslims she speaks to feel harassed, even terrorised by the police. But the remedy for that is surely dialogue and argument, not sullen silence.

More importantly, Ridley's attack on the police - denouncing them as if they were brutish thugs, bent on beating up Muslims - fails to appreciate the terrible predicament they are in. They, along with the security services, are damned if they do act - and damned if they don't.

The latter point is the most obvious. Imagine if the house at Forest Gate had indeed harboured a home-made chemical weapon. And imagine if, uncertain of their evidence, the authorities had held off - only for the weapon to have been detonated, killing hundreds, maybe thousands. None of those responsible would ever have been forgiven. The terrible truth for the police is that, even if there's only a one in twenty chance that a tip-off is right, they cannot ignore it. The risks are just too great.

Yet if they get it wrong, as they did with Jean Charles de Menezes and may have done again in Forest Gate, they come under fierce legal and political attack. Nor is this criticism wholly unjustified, for it is quite true that the alienation and anger caused by misfired police action ends up making terrorism more, not less, likely. As Britain learned with the ill-fated internment policy in northern Ireland, when a community feels singled out for harassment and worse by the authorities, even those previously unsympathetic to the terrorists' cause can be recruited. The current risk is that young Muslims in east London hostile to the jihadist message last week will be more open to it now.

So the police are in a no-win situation. Do nothing, or even wait too long, and they risk letting a terror attack happen. Act too fast and too heavy and they could alienate the very community whose support they need most. The predicament is sharpened by the inherent weakness of the one commodity on which all counter-terrorism relies: intelligence.

It used to sound so reassuring. "According to the intelligence..." police officers or politicians might say, explaining their actions. Yet in recent years we've come to realise just how flawed intelligence can be, especially when it comes - as, it seems, the Forest Gate tip did - from a single source. This means a single informant passes on a nugget of information which cannot be corroborated elsewhere. If he's paid for his work, he may want to prove he is worth the money. Or he may simply want to ingratiate himself with his bosses. He may exaggerate, knowing there is no way his claim can be independently checked.

We have learned this lesson over and over again, whether it be the intelligence failures in Northern Ireland which saw the wrong people arrested for IRA bombings or, most spectacularly, the intelligence which persuaded governments around the world that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. We've seen the same weakness demonstrated again in recent months, as police arrest suspected terrorists by the hundreds - only to release all but a handful of them.

What are the police to do in this impossible situation? There's not much they can do, except tread more carefully. Did they really need to go in so hard at Forest Gate, sending in 250 officers? When American troops raided the hideout of Uday and Qusay Hussein for a gunfight in Iraq, there were only 200 of them. Nor can it be really necessary for the police to turn such operations into a media circus, with a regular stream of gung-ho tales fed to the papers.

When there's even a remote threat of terrorist danger, of course the police have to act: we would forgive nothing less. But they have to act in a way that keeps everybody on side, and that takes great care. It is an extraordinarily difficult balancing act we are asking our police to perform - and the likes of Yvonne Ridley would do well to appreciate it.

Big business, not religion, is the real power in the White House

Bush is again pandering to the Christian right over gay rights. But Democrats should not be distracted from the main enemy

Read the full article on the Guardian website

Sometimes charity can't be too choosy

The outcry over Richard Desmond's role in a Jewish children's group must be tempered by realism

Published in the Evening Standard 1 June 2006

There was many a rabbi spluttering over his chicken soup last Friday night. The Jewish Chronicle, which is nothing if not a family newspaper, broke into its usual coverage of weddings and bar mitzvahs to introduce its readers to Red Hot Raw, Red Hot Climax and Television X - adult TV channels available on subscription only. The JC even ran a helpful little sidebar. Red Hot Rears, we learn, is "Rammed with peachy girls" while the Raw service promises "amateur sluts...all night, every night."

One can only imagine the crimson faces at the sabbath dinner table. Why did the JC do such a thing? Because it was illustrating its front-page story: outcry that the owner of those Red Hot channels, one Richard Desmond, has just been named the next president of Norwood, British Jewry's leading charity for families and children.

You read that right. Like Hugh Hefner stepping into the chair at Bernardo's or Paul Raymond taking over at Childline, Desmond is to be the titular head of Norwood. And make no mistake, Norwood's standing in the Jewish community is just as elevated as those other charities. What began as an orphanage in Mile End at the close of the 18th century has blossomed into a veritable social services network, even running its own village in the Berkshire countryside for adults with learning disabilities. Norwood says it's the "safety net" of Anglo-Jewry, the organisation people turn to when confronted with the toughest family issues - from abuse and addiction at one extreme to adoption at the other.

So the notion of a pornographer president for a charity that embodies family values has caused predictable anger. Rabbi Yitzchak Schochet of Mill Hill Synagogue said he was "disturbed" by the move: "There are certain compromises that should never be made, no matter what the financial gain." Other communal bigwigs lined up to tell the JC of their disquiet, including the former Brent MP and Labour minister Reg Freeson. His intervention was especially significant - for Freeson was himself a "Norwood boy," raised by the orphanage as a child.

Desmond has taken none of this lying down, as it were. Once he got wind of the story, the owner of Express Newspapers and OK! magazine submitted the JC to some serious pressure, heavy lawyers' letters and the like. To its credit, the paper held firm and published anyway. (Full disclosure: I write a monthly column for the JC.) Today the row continues, with the latest edition including a full page of letters on the affair, including several big names backing Desmond.

For the Jewish community, this spat is not a wholly novel experience. Some of the biggest givers to the worthiest causes have been, shall we say, colourful characters. A key communal benefactor is Gerald Ronson, who went to jail over his role in the Guinness affair. I remember, nearly 20 years ago, attending an academic conference on the Holocaust - bankrolled by Robert Maxwell.

Cynics say such generosity is of the launderette variety: it's designed to wash the giver's reputation clean. (Though that doesn't apply to Ronson, who was a big giver long before he went to jail.) And that's something this city, far beyond the Jewish community, knows all about.

Just look around. Stroll through Regents Park and Regents Street and you see a monument to the Prince who became George IV, a serial womaniser and carouser who sought to distract from his night-time activities with day-time good works, including his sponsorship of fine architecture like the Nash crescents around the Park. As Prince of Wales, Edward VII played the same trick, sitting dutifully on royal commissions into housing for poor families, even as he pursued his own novel definition of family life with actress Lillie Langtry.

Or look beneath your feet. The London Underground owes much to Charles Tyson Yerkes, the American financier who built the deep tunnels that made the Piccadilly and Northern lines possible. He went to jail as a bankrupt and sought to redeem his reputation by giving away big money, even shelling out $300,000 for a giant telescope in what is now Yerkes Observatory in Wisconsin.

It's a pattern repeated again and again. Attend enough charity dinners and you'll eventually see Jeffrey Archer pop up as an auctioneer: he does over 50 a year. Every time he brings down that gavel, he surely hopes he's making the black mark against his name a little smaller.

What should charities' attitude be to such donors? Should they regard their money or services as tainted? I don't think so. For who would benefit from such a stance? If the University of Chicago had decided Yerkes' money was not good enough, there would be no observatory today. If Norwood sent back Desmond's many millions - and he gave #2m to the group in 2004 alone - the only people to suffer would be the children and families Norwood protects. They have to be its first priority.

The alternative is that charities tell those with all but the purist fortunes their cash is not welcome - and that they should spend it on diamonds and yachts instead. People don't like Bill Gates and his domineering Microsoft company, but it's surely better that his mega-wealth goes fighting Aids and malaria than into the pockets of his children. So long as the money was made legally - and Desmond's TV businesses commit no crime - then charities should grab it with both hands.

But taking Desmond's money is different from giving him the kudos of the Norwood presidency. That role should be filled by someone whose work, at the very least, does not contradict the ethos of the charity - and Desmond's does.

The tycoon himself probably knows it. It's thought he recently sold off his adult magazines - Asian Babes and the rest - because he understood they were barring his entry into mainstream public life. All he need do is sell off the TV channels and Norwood can embrace him with open arms. Until then, his money is right for the charity - but he isn't.