The Jewish Connection
Radio 4 Wednesday, July 23
Comedy Connections: Yes Minister
BBC1, Friday, July 25
It is exactly 150 years since the first Jew took his seat in Parliament. To mark the fact, historian Ruth Cowen guided us through a century-and-a-half of Jewish representation, during which time more than 200 Jews have become MPs.
However, back in 1858, it was a bit of an anti-climax. Lionel de Rothschild, Britain’s first Jewish MP, had actually been elected 11 years earlier but stayed away from Parliament because of the obligation to take a Christian oath. One might have thought that, as the first Jewish MP, he would have had plenty to say; but he never uttered a single word in any parliamentary debate.
Since then, Jewish MPs have become considerably more voluble, and more visible. Harold Macmillan once famously commented that “there were more Old Estonians in Mrs Thatcher’s cabinet than Old Etonians”.
But there has always been a sneaking suspicion that Jewish MPs are apt to play down their Jewishness. Indeed, so keen have many Jewish representatives been to seem unaffected by their ethnicity, they have acted against rather than in the interests of their community.
This was reflected in the 1905 Aliens Act, which sought to stop the massive influx of Eastern European Jews into Britain.While many non-Jewish MPs including Winston Churchill fought to defeat the legislation, Jewish MPs either “kept shtum”, to use Cowen’s phrase, or in some cases even supported it.
Yet this attitude did not stop the flow of antisemitism, overt and covert. Lord Janner disclosed that during the 2006 Lebanon War he had to deal with “a degree of nastiness. A fellow peer, someone I respected came up to me and hit me, actually struck me, and asked me how I could be defending Israel under those circumstances.”
Others had to deal with more light-hearted quips.
Edwina Currie recalled how Nicholas Soames had become impatient with the leftwing rhetoric of Labour MP Harry Cohen, exclaiming, “When they circumcised you, they cut off the wrong bit.”
So what has been the contribution of Britain’s Jewish representatives to the community? Practically nothing. Whereas in America, it is normal to join forces to make up a lobby, in Britain this does not happen. Non-Jews, Cowen concluded, had proved much more helpful than their Jewish counterparts.
Meanwhile, in a spooky coincidence, over on BBC1 there was another programme about politics, also with the word “Connections” in the title. This came in the self-congratulatory but nonetheless fascinating Comedy Connections series, in which the origins of famous sitcoms are deconstructed.
This week the focus was on perhaps the most enduringly popular comedy series of the 1980s — Yes Minister and its sequel, Yes Prime Minister , written by Antony Jay and his Jewish co-writer Jonathan Lynn, who had progressed from the Cambridge Footlights through a part in Fiddler on the Roof in the West End to the position of established comedy writer.
When Jay had approached him with the idea for a sitcom about the relationship between a senior civil servant and a government minister, Lynn dismissed it as being “the most boring idea I’d come across for some time”.
However, the pilot was duly made and the rest is history. Margaret Thatcher became such a fan of the programme that she actually penned a script which was acted out, excruciatingly, by the stars of the show, Nigel Hawthorne and Paul Eddington.
Hawthorne and Eddington were awarded CBEs, and Jay (who also quietly wrote Conservative Party political broadcasts on the side) was given a knighthood. But mysteriously there was nothing for Lynn.
Antisemitism? Probably not. In fact, Lynn himself had an explanation. At the awards ceremony where Thatcher’s Yes Minister sketch was acted out, Lynn made a speech in which he noted that “the Prime Minister had now taken her rightful place in the world of situation comedy.
“It got a huge laugh, but for some reason I was never invited to Number 10 after that.”