Fishy business: From fighting Ken Livingstone to championing Israel, Lance Forman speaks to the JC

Walking down the River Lea to hipster Hackney Wick, lined with flotillas of Palestine flag-festooned barges and expensive bars, it’s tempting to think that this part of the East End was empty before the London 2012 Olympic games. But you’d be wrong.

So says Lance Forman, managing director of local smoked salmon stalwarts H Forman & Son, who has quite literally written a book on the question.

Canalside views of H Forman and Son (Image: Lance Forman/X)[Missing Credit]

“The official narrative of the Olympics is very different to the reality” he said in an interview with the JC in his salmon-pink headquarters opposite the Olympic Stadium, now home to West Ham United.

“The narrative was that this was a derelict wasteland that was going to be regenerated by the London Olympics. And nothing could be further from the truth, it was the greatest concentration of manufacturing land in the whole of London, essentially being wiped out for 17 days of sport.”

Forman was told to vacate his site at the time and move to a new premises by the London Development Agency, even though they had, a year earlier, “given us grant funding to build that factory”.

“And if that wasn't bad enough, the reason we built that factory was because the one beforehand – where we’d been for the previous 40 years – had flooded when the River Lea Navigation overflowed, and we were a meter under the water.

And there was more to Forman’s Job-esque biblical woes: “That flooded factory had only just been completely overhauled 18 months earlier, because we had a fire, which burned three quarters of it down. So literally, in the space of five years, we had a fire followed by a flood followed by a compulsory purchase.”

“I lecture quite a bit on crisis management at London Business School”, Forman joked.

H Forman and Son's Hackney Wick facility (Image: Lance Forman/X)[Missing Credit]

Although no stranger to politics, having previously been a special adviser to Peter Lilley, the Trade and Industry Secretary under John Major, it was in facing down the London “blob” that he became friendly with Boris Johnson, who was then standing to replace Ken Livingstone as Mayor of London.

“We got to know each other pretty well and became good friends as a result of having an enemy in common”.

The two would later go on to collaborate on the campaign to leave the European Union.

Forman and Boris Johnson overlooking the Olympic stadium.[Missing Credit]

Forman, an ardent Brexiteer, has a prominently placed red “Vote Leave” mug on his office desk.

In a roundabout way, his book let to his involvement with the campaign.

In the lift at his publishers, Biteback, he bumped into Stephen, now Lord, Parkinson, one of the organisers of the leave campaign.

“I knew Stephen because he ran the committee organising the Bicentenary celebrations for the Cambridge Union”, where Forman was president as a student.

“He said, ‘Actually, we could do with a good businessman, because we know there's a BBC interview coming up this afternoon about Brexit. Would you be happy to do it?’”.

“And after the interview, he said, ‘Well, that was alright. Would you do more of these?’ and suddenly I got drawn into the whole Brexit debate and campaign and became very active, and I was quite passionate about it.”

After the referendum, and in the Brexit inertia that marked Theresa May’s premiership, Forman was persuaded to join Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party and was elected a Member of the European Parliament in 2019.

Lance Forman addressing a Brexit Party event in 2019 (Image: Getty)AFP via Getty Images

“It was crazy. We had a discussion very early on, before we actually arrived in Brussels, as to what we thought we should do there, because some people in the party thought we shouldn't actually participate in the parliament. Because if we'd saying that the past parliament has no legitimacy, why would you participate in the parliament that you don't think it's legitimate?

"Whereas other people thought that the British people have actually elected us and should go into the parliament and sort of make our case known that this has no legitimate so there were these sorts of debates.”

In his short time as an MEP, from July 2019 to January 2020, he spoke three times in the parliament. “One occasion was on Israel, another occasion was on antisemitism, and the third one was about Brexit and Britain leaving the EU”, Forman recalled.

After the ascendency of his old pal Boris to Downing Street, and faced with the prospect of a split on the right, he very publicly defected back to the Conservatives.

“I became very concerned that the Brexit Party would split the vote and potentially risk allowing Corbyn through”, he explained. “I sort of fell out with Nigel. But everybody does fall out with Nigel but we kissed and made up and I think he probably respects the fact that I had a mind of my own and wasn't just another yes man”.

Forman (bottom left) toasting the Brexit deal in the European Parliament (Image: Getty)AFP via Getty Images

Today, the former MEP would like to see some form of unity on the right: “Starmer doesn't really need much of an opposition, because he's self-destructing anyway”, but said that “I think ultimately they will need to unite, whether it's a full merger or an alliance, I don't know, but I think they will need to unite.”

Is it hypocritical that, despite being an ardent Brexiteer, he applied for the EU’s coveted protected geographical indications (PGI) recognition for his smoked salmon?

“Life can be a bit strained at times”, he joked but insisted that it “wasn’t because we wanted the EU's protection. The reason we did it was because we thought it was a good way to explain to people the heritage of the product”.

It was British Jews, like his great grandfather who came to the UK from Odessa that, Forman says, helped create “Britain's first ever home-grown gourmet food” and that’s why, for him, what they created deserves the same recognised status as Champagne or Parma ham.

Forman and his smoked salmon[Missing Credit]

“When they first arrived here, they didn't actually realise there was a salmon native to Britain. So, they would ship over salmon from the Baltic and smoke it for their own community. And the reason they smoked the salmon was because refrigeration didn't exist, and that's how you preserve the food.

“It was only when they went to the fish market at Billingsgate and they saw these amazing wild salmon coming down from Scotland they thought, ‘Well, why don't we just use the local fish? It'll be so much easier.’ So, they started smoking the Scottish salmon. The product was just a different level.”

Forman is scathing of modern mass-produced supermarket salmon: “It's all produced to a price. It's often quite smoky and quite slimy, because if you can sell water for the price of salmon, it's great business, but you end up with quite slimy, wet salmon.

“People think that smoked salmon is supposed to taste of smoke, not realising that actually, the origins of the smoke were not to flavour”, but for preservation.

“If you've got the king of fish, why would you want to taste like an ashtray?”, he asked rhetorically.

Inside H Forman & Son.[Missing Credit]

Forman’s London Cure recipe – which also has the London Beit Din’s Kosher stamp – Smoked Scottish salmon cured in east London in a way unchanged for over 100 years, means it is London’s first ever food or drink to achieve the coveted status.

Being a prominent Jewish-owned business in east London hasn’t been without challenges.

In 2014 “Free Gaza” was spray-painted over the building’s shutters.

Although he says he isn’t too bothered about graffiti normally, “because there's loads of artists in the area…we had some graffiti artists spray a nice ‘H Forman & Son’ on our front entrance, because if you show them you respect their art, they'll generally respect your building”, this time, he thought he was being targeted.

Yet the experience didn’t deter him from being a vocal supporter of Israel both online and offline.

“I've always been a very strong Zionist. My dad was a Holocaust survivor, so obviously some of it comes from that” said Forman, who had also been to Israel as a youngster with BBYO and had been on the board of Conservative Friends of Israel when he was a special adviser.

His wife, Rene Anisfeld, is chair of the pro-Israel campaign group StandwithUs UK, of which he is also a passionate supporter.

To Forman, it is important to “educate the next generation so that they can stand proudly in their Jewish roots”.

“If you don't have the knowledge, you don't have the confidence, and then you then you sort of run away, or you might even go to going to the other side, because you want to ingratiate yourself with your enemies, because you think that that might protect you, and that that's never really worked in Jewish history.”

But Forman claims that the worst abuse he’s received, both online and offline, was over Brexit, rather than antisemitism.

A huge Nazi symbol that was daubed on the firm's headquarters[Missing Credit]

“When I decided to stand to become a Brexit Party MEP, we ended up with a 30-foot swastika sprayed on the building”, something reported by the JC  at the time.
“I was basically accused of being a fascist because I was standing for the Brexit Party. The whole thing was just weird. And when the newspapers explained how awful it was that the son of a Holocaust survivor had a giant swastika sprayed on his building, we received this anonymous phone call from a young girl who was almost in tears, saying she's a friend of the graffiti artist that did it, and had no idea of my heritage, and was so apologetic that this had been done. That was a bit bonkers.”

Although he’s an optimist when it comes to the future of British Jews in the UK, and he himself has no plans to pack up and leave, there is still a familiar sense of apprehension when it comes to antisemitism.

“You've got to be alert to it. You’d be stupid if you weren't. We all know what happened in Germany in the 1930s.”

Despite being an enthusiastic Brexiteer, he has traditionally shied away from making arguments about immigration.

“I always felt a bit uncomfortable talking about immigration, because I'm a son of an immigrant myself.

“You could even argue that my dad was an illegal immigrant because he came over here, effectively as an orphan with his sister just after the war”.

Forman’s father Marcel and arrived in the UK in 1946 along with his sister Jacqueline, their parents followed two years later.

Originally from Nowy Sacz in Poland they survived being arrested by the Soviets and time in testing conditions in Siberia and later Bohkara, Uzbekistan.

“They weren't orphans, but their parents said they were orphans because it was the only way they could get them to safety.”

But the difference between the current wave of mass immigration which he says “the world needs to grapple with” is a question of values, not culture.

“Is that clear that the people who came over then shared the values”, he said, adding “the massive wave of immigration that we've had in recent years is not from people that share western values, and I think that is problematic for society, and I think British society is recognising that”.