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7 October 2009updated 12 Oct 2023 11:14am

Jonathan Freedland on Stephen Pollard

Jewish Chronicle editor attacked by his own columnist

By Mehdi Hasan

In his spirited attack on the Tories and their “unsavoury” European allies in today’s Guardian, the columnist Jonathan Freedland — who also happens to be a star columnist for the Jewish Chronicle — launches a side attack on his Kaminski-supporting, Labour-hating, neoconservative boss, Stephen Pollard, over at the JC:

The Tory defence has been weak. They have cited the embrace extended to Kaminski by first, the editor of the Jewish Chronicle, and second, the Conservative Friends of Israel, which astonishingly welcomed Kaminski yesterday. What Tories do not point out is that the former is now a fierce anti-Brown partisan while the latter is, as the name suggests, wholly aligned with the Conservatives. Of course they are defending Cameron’s decision. And both have spoken chiefly about Kaminski, suggesting a reluctance to defend the Latvian party. Besides, the president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews has now written to Cameron, raising questions about the Tory leader’s new friends in Europe.

Freedland also amusingly imagines the “attack ads” that Labour spin doctors could launch against the Conservatives, if they borrowed a page from the playbook of American politicians (and, I might add, if they got their act together!):

Just imagine what a US presidential campaign would do with this ammunition. You could run an ad showing the Tory duo in their Bullingdon tails, reminding voters of their personal wealth, and asking how these two could ever be in touch with real people. You might show a man on a bike, later revealed to be followed by a car. The screen would fill with three words: “David Cameron: fake.”

But the ad any American politico worth his salt would be itching to make would open thus. “They say you can judge a man by the company he keeps. So what does it say about David Cameron that these are his friends?” At which point we’d see images of the men feted in Manchester yesterday, Michal Kaminski, of Poland’s Law and Order party (PiS), and Roberts Zile, of Latvia’s Freedom and Fatherland party, who now sit as allies with the British Conservatives in the European Parliament — an issue raised first, to his enormous credit, by David Miliband last week.

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