RUTHFULLY YOURS

Nick Clegg does not offer ‘new’ politics. I saw his true colours when I asked him about Jenny Tonge

By Douglas Murray Politics Last updated: April 20th, 2010
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I’m still not sure I haven’t been in some waking nightmare for the last few days, watching Nick Clegg hailed as a hybrid of Winston Churchill and Mr Sheen. I won’t ruminate on how incompetent the Conservative party have been to allow this nightmare to occur. Gerald Warner has already more than covered this. Rather, I wanted to offer an anecdote about just how much of an alternative Mr Clegg actually presents.

I have only come across Mr Clegg in person once. It was last summer and he was giving a talk to a room full of people in the House of Commons. It was about anti-Semitism.

So Mr Clegg gave a heart-warming speech in which he came out bravely, albeit (through no particular fault of his own) some decades too late, as an opponent of Nazism. He explained how hard he had battled all his political life to oppose anti-Semitism. I thought all this was a bit too easy and a bit too obvious. I think the bar for political parties has to be put slightly higher than simply congratulating them for condemning Nazism.
It came to the question and answer session and I got in first. I thanked him for his condemnation of anti-Semitism but pointed out that tackling this might, like charity, begin at home. And therefore what was he going to do about the presence on the Liberal Democrat benches in the Lords of Jenny “Jihad” Tonge.

I read him some her more exotic quotes, such as: “The pro-Israel lobby has got its grips on the Western world, its financial grips. I think they have probably got a certain grip on our party.” And I then asked how this squared with the speech he had just given us on stamping out anti-Semitism.

To cut a long story short Clegg declared that if she said anything like this on his watch he would discipline her. Fortunately a colleague of mine was in the room to ask the follow-up question. Since Mr Clegg had become party leader Jenny had said the following things… and then read out a list. She had also met with Hamas leader Khaled Mesha’al and praised him as “shrewd, plausible and actually very likeable”. She had also praised a Hamas supporter who had declared his own desire to become a suicide bomber.

Interestingly, Nick Clegg attempted to get around this by disputing dates. He appeared to think he had become Liberal Democrat leader a year after he had done. Which would of course have allowed him to avoid having these things said on his watch. I was sure it was a perfectly innocent mistake.
So the next day I wrote to him asking him to clear this up. He had made a public promise to deal with Jenny Tonge if she said such things on his watch, and here were the things she had said on his watch. Therefore when was he going to act?

Nick did not bother replying to the letter. So a copy found its way to the Jewish Chronicle and they ran a big story about how the Lib Dem leader had been caught out. His office tried to damage-limit by claiming that nobody could ever know because these were “selective quotes from a meeting of which there is no recording or transcript”. Albeit one in front of hundreds of people…

Anyhow – a month later Clegg was interviewed in the Jewish Chronicle by Martin Bright, who described little Nick as “beyond angry. Incandescent almost gets it, but that still doesn’t capture the full fury of the man”. This must certainly have been terrifying to behold. And what made the Clegg so utterly enraged? It was, he said, “the very suggestion that I might explicitly or tacitly give cover to racism, I find politically abhorrent and personally deeply offensive.”

The reason why it was impossible that he could give sanctuary in his party to an anti-Semite was because, he explained he is “half-Dutch, quarter Russian, quarter British” and “married to a Spaniard”. Since then Jenny Tonge has remained in the Liberal Democrat party despite, as I reported here, recently calling for an inquiry into whether or not Israeli medical teams were busy stealing organs from victims of the earthquake in Haiti.
But the reason I mention all this is because Nick Clegg looks like he may well be going places. And he is doing so while claiming to represent some entirely new, honest and fresh type of politics. In my brief but unpleasant experience of Mr Clegg I would say that he is very far from representing any kind of change from the politics we have all observed in recent years.

Tags: Jenny Tonge, Nick Clegg

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/douglasmurray/100035586/nick-clegg-does-not-offer-new-politics-i-saw-his-true-colours-when-i-asked-him-about-jenny-tonge/