1 min read
Robert Halfon has an interesting story at Centre Right about Ken Livingstone's campaign: A friend went to the Criterion Theatre to see a play about Anne Frank's friend, Eva Schloss. Although in no way was this a party political event, Livingstone supporters were there handing out leaflets outside.
Nothing wrong with that you might say, but then it gets worse. Deputy Mayor Nicky Gavron was invited on the stage to answer questions about her Jewish background. She apparently turned the occasion into a party political broadcast, urging the audience to vote for Ken - the response was booing and hissing from the audience. Given Ken Livingstone's previous embrace of extreme Islamists and his comparison of a Jewish journalist with a concentration camp guard, it does seem astonishing that the Mayor's team think they can exploit the holocaust for political ends and hijack an important theatre production for party political purposes.
I'm less interested in the leafleting - I don't see why there is, as Rob writes, anything wrong with that. Much more interesting, surely, is the reaction of the audience to Nicky Gavron's clearly cack-handed attempts to exploit the Deputy Mayor's religion.
When the Mayoral contest started, I thought Livingstone was a shoo-in, not least because, as I wrote here, I couldn't take Boris seriously. Clearly I was very wrong about the former, even if I still have the same reaction to Boris. The fact seems to be that many others now share my reaction to Ken: that the imperative is to remove from office a man who proudly embraces Islamofascists.