To the very last, rivals can't escape each other

A frontpage commentary on the handover from Blair to Brown

Day one: introducing the new foreign secretary

David Miliband will be welcomed by the Foreign Office - but there could be an interesting clash ahead with the new Middle East envoy.

From the Guardian's Comment is Free

Pinch yourself: today Tony Blair will go out with his head held high

The debacle of Iraq ought to have made a dignified exit impossible. But if his departure is bizarre, so too is Brown's arrival

Published in the Guardian

Will there be a happy ending?

In The Rise and Fall of Tony Blair the basic stories were lavishly retold. But the greatest crackle came when Gordon Brown's name was mentioned.

From the Guardian blog

Graveyard announcement that asks more questions than it answers

On Lord Goldsmith's resignation

Published in the Guardian

How to silence the boycotters

Published in the Jewish Chronicle

If proof were needed of the sheer folly of the campaign to launch an academic boycott of Israel, it came in two dollops last week. First, the armed takeover of Gaza by Hamas showed the true irrelevance of the boycott effort. Palestinians were shedding their brothers' blood, their putative state broken in two and their dream of statehood set ever further back - and all the while a handful of British scholars delude themselves that their refusal of the odd invite from Tel Aviv University will help.

The second proof came in the list of signatories to the anti-boycott advertisements that appeared in national newspapers last week. Among the familiar and reliable names - the Robert Winstons and Ruth Deechs - were several that leapt out. Dr Keith Kahn-Harris and Prof David Newman, for example: both on the left and both firm critics of Israeli policy. Yet there they were, nestling alongside my upstairs neighbour on this page, Prof Geoffrey Alderman, who could never be mistaken, even by his enemies, for a leftist.

This is the genius of the boycott campaign: to have driven together those who would normally be bitterly divided by the question of Israel. What, from the boycotters' own point of view, could have been more counter-productive? A smart pro-Palestinian campaign would peel away Zionist moderates from the hardliners, leaving the ultra-hawks isolated. That's certainly what any undergraduate course in politics would teach.

The boycott has already had the opposite effect. Instead of encouraging mainstream Jewish critics of the Israeli occupation to speak out, it's made them close ranks with those they would ordinarily oppose. A few years back a couple of very eminent Liberal Jewish rabbis attended a memorial ceremony for Deir Yassin. Now the chief executive of Liberal Judaism denounces the boycott as "antisemitic." This is the boycott's great achievement: to have triggered an outbreak of unity in defence of Israel. Those readers who have got used to spitting with rage when reading my own critiques of Israeli policy might note that I too have joined the anti-boycott chorus - forming a rare consensus with my fellow contributors to this slot.

Indeed, I admit to a flush of pride at the communal efforts mobilised to overturn the University and College Union vote: the websites, the meetings, the campus activism. Nor can I be the only one reassured by the news that Anthony Julius and Alan Dershowitz have joined forces to form a legal dream team, committed to using the law to block the boycotters' every path.

And yet, I cannot help but feel that, for all our ingenuity, this is an unwinnable struggle. Not that we can't overturn this boycott, or the ones proposed by journalists or doctors or artists: I'm sure that, through organisation and hard work, we can defeat them all. But we will be plugging gaps in a leaking ceiling: each time we stop one flow, another will burst forth somewhere else. We can hold back the flood for a while - but not forever.

The flood in question is the global desire to see the Palestinians get a state of their own, combined with global disapproval of Israel's retention of the territory it won in 1967. We can come up with a thousand clever, nimble arguments - insisting that there's no one to give the land to, that the Palestinians are so bent on Israel's destruction they have forfeited the right to statehood - and all of these might buy us some time. They have bought us a few years already. But we cannot hold back the tide indefinitely.

Some will say that Israel's enemies will never be satisfied until the country has disappeared completely - and for some hardcore anti-Zionists that is doubtless true. But we should think back to that most basic, undergraduate lesson in politics. It's politics-for-beginners that Israel should try to separate its mild critics from its hardcore foes. A serious, sustained effort at peacemaking, opening with a statement that Israel is ready, in principle, to withdraw to the 1967 borders, subject to minor adjustments, would do just that. If progress came, only the die-hard, irreconcilable anti-Zionists would be left - suddenly reduced to an isolated fringe. (That is indeed what happened in the Oslo heyday of the mid-1990s.)

But if things continue as they are, we risk tainting the entire idea of a Jewish state with the reality of the day-to-day occupation. The average onlooker, watching the horrors on the TV news, grows susceptible to the message that this nightmare is the logical consequence of Israel's very existence, that the only way to improve things is to shun Israel entirely.

So yes, we need to keep applying our wit and energy to overturning the boycotts, to plugging those leaks. But what a difference we could make if we dedicated even half that effort towards nudging Israel in the right direction - and to beating back the flood before it drowns us.

How long should London keep Ken?

The Tories want to limit the number of terms the Mayor can stand. But that won't help them win - and it's also plain undemocratic

Published in the Evening Standard

Here’s a novel way to see off Ken Livingstone. If you can’t beat him at the ballot box, why not simply bar him from standing? It’s a tactic with quite a pedigree: Margaret Thatcher deployed it when she abolished the Livingstone-led Greater London Council 20 years ago and Tony Blair tried it when blocking Ken’s selection as Labour’s mayoral candidate in 2000. And guess what: the Tories are trying it all over again.

In the House of Lords on Tuesday, two Tory peers – who double as the leaders of Kensington & Chelsea and of Essex County Council – slipped in a little amendment to the bill reforming London’s governance. To the category of people disqualified from serving as London’s mayor, they added a new type of person: anyone who “has previously been elected or been the Mayor twice.” Not many people who fit that description. In fact there’s just one. You know the guy: middle-aged, nasal drawl, fondness for newts.

Thanks to Tory and Lib Dem votes, the amendment passed. Unless the Commons reverses it, it will become law – possibly in time to bar Ken in 2008, and certainly to block him in 2012. You can see why Baroness Hanham and Lord Hanningfield would have congratulated themselves on Tuesday night. It must have looked like such a smart wheeze, bringing the London mayor in line with his New York counterpart, who has been bound by a two-term limit for the last decade. With a simple tweak of the law, the seemingly invincible Livingstone would be swept out of the way, levelling the playing field and giving the Tories, at last, a chance of winning power in the capital.

But it’s a delusion, another error by a Conservative party that seems to get more accident-prone the closer it gets to the politics of London. For David Cameron, like Tony Blair before him, City Hall is surely coming to resemble a giant steel-and-glass headache.

Advocates of term limits are keen to present the move as a high-minded democratic reform. Running this city should never be a job for life, they argue. Indeed, Baronness Hanham warned that “the office of mayor now in this country is the nearest thing we have to a dictator,” adding that “there is very little that can stop the mayor doing what he wants to do.”

But that suggests the problem is with the mayor’s powers: if they’re too great, they should be reduced, regardless of how long he serves. The mayor shouldn’t be allowed to rule like a dictator for one day, let alone eight years. (In fact, the mayor’s powers are far weaker than those of his opposite numbers in, say, Chicago or New York.)

It’s futile to look for a coherent, constitutional principle here: you won’t find it. This is raw politics and nothing more. With term limits it always is. Take the most famous example, the rule that prevents a US president serving more than two terms. That was instituted by an exasperated Republican party worn down by losing four times in a row to the great Franklin Roosevelt. You don’t have to think that Ken is a latter-day FDR to see the parallel.

Don’t take my word for it. Tory mayoral hopeful Nicholas Boles was spitting blood yesterday at a move which he insisted had come “from out of the blue.” He told me term limits were “crass and fatuous”, insisting that it was “idiotically defensive to suggest we can’t beat Livingstone without resorting to some device outside politics.”

Principle is on his side, too. In a democracy, voters should be able to choose who governs them and when to kick them out. The notion of two unelected peers, of all people, restricting that right truly sticks in the craw.

One of our more thoughtful politicians agrees with that. In January, he told the House of Commons that term limits were “alien to the British constitution” and would inevitably be seen not as an impartial act but “as an attempt to clip Ken’s wings.”

The trouble is, those words were spoken by Michael Gove, the frontbencher leading for the Conservatives on the London bill in the Commons. Six months ago he was against term limits; now his party is for them. What’s changed? The official line last night was that there had been no shift, and that Tory policy remains as Gove explained it in January. Yet the peers were hardly freelance operators: Hanham is a Conservative frontbencher and was leading on the London bill in the Lords. In other words, Conservative policy in one chamber is the polar opposite of Conservative policy in the other. It looks uncomfortably like another Tory shambles, which have been coming with awkward regularity in recent months.

And nowhere more so than in London. Barely two months have passed since the Greg Dyke fiasco, when Cameron was revealed as ready to put forward no Tory candidate in London, in order to give a clear run to the former BBC boss – only for his offer to be rebuffed. That episode confirmed that whichever Conservative does eventually take on Ken, he will be the leadership’s second choice. Meanwhile, Cameron’s much-vaunted primary process is still stalled, with all too few of the big-name candidates he coveted. As one contributor to the activists’ website, ConservativeHome, put it yesterday: “David Cameron and his office monkeys at CCO [Conservative Central Office] really need to get off their backsides and get a candidate for next years Mayoral elections!”

It’s not just the hunt for a plausible challenger that’s got the London Tories tripped up. They’ve also been outmanouevred on the apparently obscure issue of nominating people to serve on London’s fire authority. The mayor initially rejected all but one of their list of seven names – because there was not a black or Asian Londoner among them. The Lib Dems have been lambasted by the mayor, too: their three nominees were all white men. (Ken has now backed down and accepted the Lib Dem choices). Labour’s nominees were three Asian men, one black woman and one white woman.

The Tories retort that race and gender have got nothing to do with a body that’s about putting out fires. But they’ve walked straight into a classic Livingstone trap. He can note the 41 black, Asian or minority councillors the Conservatives have in London and ask why none were deemed good enough to serve on the fire authority. He can further claim, as one of his senior aides did yesterday, that the two main opposition parties “just don’t get London”. That hurts Cameron especially: just this week he was saying that Gordon Brown “just doesn’t get Britain.”

It’s vintage jujitsu from the mayor, skillfully wrongfooting his opponents, exposing as hollow their claims to be progressive. London is a warning to Cameron of how bumpy the path ahead could be – and no amount of clever parliamentary tricks will help him.

The scene of Fatahland flowering as Hamastan wilts is sheer fantasy

There are huge dangers in offering Palestinians a choice of statelets - it will only push Hamas further into Iran's orbit

Published in the Guardian

In everyone's interest

Amid the dreadful scenes in Gaza there is a glimmer of hope with renewed calls for an international force to restore order.

From the Guardian's Comment is free

Bush's Amazing Achievement

Published in the New York Review of Books

Don't knock it - Sugar's a winner for our times

With its unashamed pursuit of money and multi-ethnic contestants, The Apprentice holds up a mirror to our city today

Published in the Evening Standard

So the Londoner won. Last night Alan Sugar, the self-described “bloody old fool,” chose Simon Ambrose, native son of Hampstead Garden Suburb, to serve as his newest Apprentice. If the cold calculus of the balance sheet alone had been decisive, Sugar would doubtless have plumped for the super-capable, steadily competent Kristina Grimes. Instead sentiment got the better of him: he liked Simon’s quirkiness, his risk-taking, the gleam in his eye. For three consecutive series, Sugar has been looking for a surrogate son, someone he could groom as a possible successor. Last night,
the fondness of his smile suggested he had got his man.

Of course the real winner is the BBC, which has a certified hit on its hands. Summer after summer, the Apprentice has risen above the rest of the reality TV chaff and emerged as genuine water-cooler television: these last weeks, I heard it talked about everywhere. Even the spin-off show, The Apprentice: You’re Fired over on BBC Two, acquired a cult following.

Last week’s shock withdrawal of pantomime villain Katie Hopkins was
debated in pubs and offices, on online talkboards and radio phone-ins and across the quality press. The freakshow ringmasters of Channel 4’s Big Brother can only look on with envy.

Yes, I know the criticisms. Sir Alan – forget the new egalitarianism,
Sugar is only ever known by his full title – is far from the business
genius claimed by the programme. The naysayers note that his Amstrad
operation is worth less than a tenth of the value it commanded at its
peak, its computers now remembered as a fond joke. Compared to the likes of Terry Leahy or Stuart Rose, Sugar is distinctly minor league. What’s more, add the carpers, Sugar’s confrontational way of doing business – all raised voices and jabbed fingers – went out with red braces and shoulder pads, if it was ever in. The true titans of business are softly-spoken consensus builders, their work a world away from the adrenalin-filled shout-fests that make up the Apprentice.

All of which may be true, but none of which much matters. The show is
great television, Sugar a natural TV star. And it has a more enduring
value too. For the Apprentice provides an irresistible snapshot of this city at this time, capturing the London of 2007 as precisely as any novel or movie.

There are the pictures for a start. Those aerial shots of the capital, the camera swooping over the river, lingering by Canary Wharf and the Eye, either in the first sunlight of early morning or in the shimmering glitter of evening, reveal a London that has never looked lovelier. You don’t see the sweaty crush on the Tube or the choking fumes of the bus, just the gleaming sparkle of a city in its 21st century pomp.

That fits the tenor of a programme that is unashamedly Londoncentric.
While other parts of the BBC’s output have to apologise for featuring the capital so centrally, always conscious of the obligation to include the regions, the Apprentice begins and ends in London. Sugar sets his tasks in London Zoo or at the top of the Telecom tower; the teams sell coffee in Islington or art in Cork Street. The loser is shown leaving, suitcase in hand, in the back of a black cab.

Last night’s show was yet another extended tourist promotion for this
city. Sir Alan asked Kristina and Simon to design a replacement for the IBM building he owns on the South Bank. He wanted a new “landmark for London.” Research took the duelling rivals to the London Aquarium, the Science Museum and Kew Gardens. They presented their designs to property’s movers and shakers at the old Billingsgate Market – now, like so many old working areas of London, swanked up as a party venue and arts space.

But in the Apprentice the capital is never just the backdrop. The unstated message of the show is that making it in Britain means coming to London. Mancunian Adam or Scottish Ghazal all compete for a job in the big city: indeed, Katie came unstuck last week over her inability to relocate from Exeter. Sugar told her straight: “I ain’t got no businesses in Devon.” It was London – or nothing.

The faces arrayed around Sugar’s boardroom table reflect something real about the capital too. They are as diverse a bunch as you would find on any morning train. In the first series, the final four consisted of black Londoner (and eventual winner) Tim Campbell, Asian motormouth Saira Khan alongside candidates with Italian and Jewish roots. Syed Ahmed was a stand-out performer last year, while Tre Azam – with a line in four-letter invective that gloriously defied his Islamist-style beard – won hearts this year.

Better still, this diversity is taken for granted on the Apprentice, as it is in much of today’s London. The contestants abuse each other routinely, but not (as far as we’ve seen) on grounds of race or sexuality. Here, too, Sugar deserves credit. When each week he weighed up which of the three luckless souls before him should be fired, he gave no hint of bias: white candidates lost out to black, and vice versa. As an employer, Alan Sugar appeared as colour-blind as every modern London boss should be. (Though after he grilled Katie on her childcare arrangements last week, but not Tre on his, the same cannot be said of Sugar’s attitude to gender.)

Above all, the Apprentice deals in the golden substance that makes
London’s wheels go around: money. The weekly tasks have only one aim, to make the most cash. That suits a city which, even New York concedes, is fast becoming the world’s financial capital. London is throbbing with money just now – and the Apprentice captures the moment exquisitely.

In Alan Sugar, London has found its embodiment. The Hackney boy made good, the Jewish market trader whose rags have turned to riches, his is the quintessential London tale. That his fortune is no longer derived from manufacturing but from property could be a parable of the London economy of 2007.

Now Sugar has a new sidekick, in the form of Simon Ambrose. Lets hope his apprenticeship works out. But lets also hope he is under no illusions. Simon was not the best thing about the Apprentice. Nor, even, was his new boss. Make no mistake: London is the star of this show.

Brown's bane will be getting dragged into an American attack on Iran

Brown's bane will be getting dragged into an American attack on Iran

Published in the Guardian

Gordon Brown and the value of a good joke

From the Guardian's Short Cuts section

This foolish boycott will solve nothing

Published in the Evening Standard

Lord knows, I've had my differences with Ken Livingstone, especially when it comes to the politics of the Middle East - but there's one issue he's got absolutely right. Last week, to the enormous surprise of much of London's Jewish community, the mayor agreed with them - and came out against an academic boycott of Israel.

Unfortunately, his intervention came too late. The very next day, Britain's University and College Union voted to promote the call for a boycott. Now, I was raised to be respectful of teachers and positively reverential towards academics. Which is why it pains me to say that this decision is almost laughably stupid. But it is. If a student had come up with it, he would find it daubed with a thick red line, from top to bottom.

First, it lacks all logical consistency. Let's say you accept, as I do, that Israel is wrong to be occupying the territories it won in the Six Day war, whose 40th anniversary is being marked this week. Let's say that that is your reason for boycotting Israel. Then why no boycott of China for its occupation of Tibet? Or of Russia for its brutal war against the Chechens? Or of Sudan, for its killing of hundreds of thousands in Darfur, a murderous persecution described by the US as genocide?

If it's the ill-treatment of Palestinians in particular that concerns you, then why no boycott of Lebanon, whose army continues to pound the Palestinian refugee camp of Nahr el-Bared, killing civilians daily? True, the Lebanese government is not a military occupier. But if occupation is the crime that warrants international ostracism, then why no boycott of American universities? After all, the US is occupying Iraq and Afghanistan. So, for that matter, is Britain. Why do the good men and women of UCU not speak out, by boycotting, say, Oxford, Cambridge and London universities? Why do they not boycott themselves?

Maybe academic freedom is their chief concern. That would make sense, given that they're academics. But if that was the issue, there would surely be boycotts of Syria, Egypt, Libya, Iran and Saudi Arabia, to name just a few places where intellectual freedom remains a fond dream. (The awkward truth is that the freest place in the Middle East for an Arab scholar is Israel.) Yet the UCU sees no "moral implications," to use the language of last week's resolution, in institutional ties with Damascus, Cairo or Tehran. Only Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.

For some reason, the activists pushing for this move believe Israelis should be placed in a unique category of untouchability. Never mind the 655,000 the US and Britain have, on one estimate, killed in Iraq. Never mind the two million displaced in Darfur. Never mind the closed, repressive societies of the Middle East. The Israelis are a people apart, one that must be shunned.

But let's be charitable and forgive the boycotters their inconsistency. Surely any tactic, even an inconsistent one, is forgivable if it does some good. This, though, is where the combined geniuses of the UCU have really blundered. For a boycott will be hugely counter-productive.

For one thing, Israeli academics are disproportionately represented in Israel's "peace camp." The UCU will be boycotting the very people who have done most to draw the Israeli public's attention to the folly of the occupation, to the very people working to bring an end to this desperate conflict. By their actions, the UCU will embolden the Israeli right who will be able to say, 'Look, the world hates and isolates us: this is exactly why we have to be militarily strong.'

The second error is more subtle. One of the few things that might make Israel change course would be a shift in diaspora Jewish opinion: those campaigning for Palestinian rights and an end to the occupation need to win over Jewish allies. Yet no tactic is more likely to alienate Jews than a boycott. That's because the very word has deep and painful resonances for Jews: a boycott of Jewish business was one of the Nazis' opening moves. No one is equating the current plan with that. But of all the tactics to have chosen, a boycott is the very dumbest one.

Advocates say there's nothing to worry about, this will be a boycott of institutions, not individuals - a necessary move because no Israeli institution has ever taken a stand against the occupation. This, too, is numb-skulled. When do academic institutions ever take a collective stand against anything? Did Imperial College declare itself against the Iraq war? What was the British Museum's view of UK policy in Northern Ireland? Of course there was no such thing. Institutions of learning don't take a stand; individuals do.

Which is why it will be individuals who are ostracised by this action. When you boycott the Hebrew University, you're not boycotting bricks and mortar but the men and women who teach there. The "institutional" talk is just a ruse designed to make this boycott more palatable. It will still end in the shunning of individuals.

And why? Simply because they are citizens of the wrong country, born with the wrong nationality. In 2003 the Linguistic Society of America declared itself against blacklisting scholars simply because of the actions of their governments. "Such boycotts violate the principle of free scientific interaction and cooperation, and they constitute arbitrary and selective applications of collective punishment." They also amount to a pretty crass form or discrimination: you can't come to this conference, because you've got the wrong colour passport.

Oh, but none of these arguments stopped the boycott of South Africa, say the pro-blacklisters. Except these situations are completely different. In South Africa, the majority of the people were denied a vote in the state in which they lived. Israelis and Palestinians are, by contrast, two peoples locked in a national conflict which will be resolved only when each has its own, secure state.

Ken Livingstone is right: to launch a boycott of Israel now would hurt, not help the search for the peace that might end this Middle East tragedy. And that, when all the posturing is put to one side, is all that should matter.

Tripping through the minefield

The citizenship of native-born Britons should not be contingent on passing a test. But it should mean something, and it should be valued.

From the Guardian's Comment is free

OK, let's have a Britishness test. But it must be for everyone, migrant or not

Published in the Guardian

The uncanny similarities between Blair and Beckham

Published in the Guardian's Short Cuts section