Diwali lamps are out, Shabbat candles are in—at 10 Downing Street.
Rishi Sunak laid it thick when he left the rooms that had housed most prime ministers since King George II offered them in 1732 to Robert Walpole. “One of the most remarkable things about Britain is just how unremarkable it is that two generations after my grandparents came here with little, I could become prime minister, and that I could watch my two young daughters light Diwali candles on the steps in Downing Street.”
Sunak was the first practising Hindu to live in No 10. Om Shanti! He had one Diwali and two Holis there. Now let’s count Keir Starmer’s Rosh Hashanas and Yom Kippurs. Shalom!
Starmer is no Jew. By birth he is a Christian; by faith he is an atheist, but goes to synagogues with his Jewish wife (better do, for shalom at home). Enough for the media in Israel to call for a kosher party, just as we Indians had ours 20 months ago.
Illustration: Deni Lal
Many are writing the British got a Jewish first lady. Tut, tut…! The concepts of first citizen and first lady are republican and American. The Brits have the monarch and subjects. The monarch need not be a citizen; they have imported many, like William III from Holland and the early Georges from Germany.
A Jew in No 10 is no big deal either. They had one ruling them more than a century ago. Benjamin Disraeli is counted as one, though his father had converted to the Church of England. They even sent a Jew to rule us—Lord Reading, viceroy from 1921 to 1926. We hardly knew the difference.
Starmer is a bundle of left-right contradictions. He was a Trotskyist in youth, wears a Labour label, is a human rights lawyer who saved over 400 people from the gallows, and a professed anti-monarchist. On the right side, he has been a tough crown prosecutor, defended trigger-happy cops, been harsh on rioters, is a darling of the City of London, and a knight of the realm. He is Sir Keir, not Comrade Starmer.
Britain has had a mixed record of anti-Semitism. William the Conqueror brought in moneyed Jews in 1066 to make England richer, but Edward I banished them two centuries later for practising usury. A few Jews continued to live on here and there, but most Britons—including Chaucer who got the Prioress tell the story of a hymn-singing Christian child who was murdered by Jews, Shakespeare who ‘villained’ Shylock, or Christopher Marlowe who made his Jew of Malta a psychopath-killer—had probably never set their eyes on a Jew till Oliver Cromwell lifted the ban in 1656.
Years later, even the progressive-liberal Dickens made his Fagin a “disgusting” villain in Oliver Twist. He made amends by making Riah a paragon of virtue in Our Mutual Friend, just as Walter Scott balanced the usurer Isaac in Ivanhoe with his virtuous daughter Rebecca. Hard to believe today, but Scott’s Jew finally opted for life in Muslim Granada since it was safer than was Christian England!
Jews began getting elected to Parliament after a law banning them was lifted in 1858. Since then they have had several MPs including seven of the Rothschilds, one of the world’s richest families. No wonder, after getting the Arabs to help them defeat the Turks in World War I, Britain gave a homeland to the Jews in Palestine. Since then West Asia hasn’t had shalom.
How will Starmer handle Palestine? Labour had been soft towards the Palestine cause, but Starmer has steered them to the centre-right. That won him votes of a few Sunak-sick Tories, but lost more core Labour votes to independents, the Greens and others.
The Tory core may have rotted; but the Labour core could rot Starmer.
prasannan@theweek.in