Wearing Religion As A Shield
If I think of David Miliband (something I try to avoid), it is as a particularly unctuous little squirt who, despite never having held a proper job in his life, has risen without trace to the high office of Foreign Secretary. Until yesterday, however, I had never for a moment thought of him as Jewish.

It is not as if he goes round wearing a yarmulke. If I had given any thought to his character and antecedents, what attracted my attention was the fact that his father was a noted (by those whose inclination is to note such things) Marxist theoretician, whose passion for his ghastly hero was so great that he had himself interred close by Marx’s grave in Highgate Cemetery. It was a fact that was far more informative of his character than any notional attachment to a particular religion might be.

That both his parents were of Polish-Jewish extraction had entirely escaped me until The Foreign Secretary petulantly thrust the fact squarely into the public domain yesterday in an extraordinary exchange with Michael Connarty the Labour Chairman of the European Scrutiny Committee.

For those of you already bridling at what you think is about to be an anti-semitic rant, it is not: read the piece carefully.

The nub of the exchange came at a time when the Foreign Secretary was being given an extremely rough time (justifiably) by Mr. Connarty and his colleagues over the worth of the so-called ‘Red Lines’, the chosen totems of the Prime Minister and Mr. Miliband with which they seek to persuade us that they are defending British Independence and our National Interest. Mr. Miliband was extolling at some lengths the virtues of these ‘Red Lines’ such that he was making it sound as though the UK had indeed been close to servitude but had been saved by the adept manoeuvring of himself and his boss.