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Letter From LondonThe Levy Incident.

By Geoffrey Wheatcroft
Posted Thursday, March 22, 2007, at 6:21 PM ET
Lord Levy. Click image to expand.

In 1912, British politics were roiled by the Marconi affair. As long ago as it was, it's strikingly relevant in view of the cash-for-honors affair that is now roiling London, since on both occasions there has been a subplot—a recurrent theme of anti-Semitism. But then another theme has recurred: the love of money, which is the root of so much political evil. Sex scandals cheer us all up from time to time, but not even Bill Clinton's worst enemy—or Newt Gingrich's—could claim they are as damaging to public life as financial corruption, whether for personal or party gain.

Whatever other successes Tony Blair would like to claim, his Labor Party has gone broke over the 10 years of his prime ministership, and he has resorted to drastic means to raise money, notably through his friend, tennis partner, and fund-raiser Lord Levy, who is in the eye of the current storm over the alleged sale of peerages and other honors. Since I wrote about this here last year, Levy has been arrested, though not yet charged, and in December Blair himself made another contribution to the history of our damp little island when he became the first prime minister ever to be questioned by the police at Downing Street. Blair is now alarmed that Levy won't carry the can and go quietly like Scooter Libby (if I have read that right from afar), but that he might, to the contrary, spill the beans.

Now a different anxiety has been expressed: that Levy is the victim of the oldest prejudice of all. "The Jewish community is becoming increasingly more sensitive," says Rabbi Yitzchak Schochet, Levy's friend and rabbi, "that there's the one Jew seemingly being hung out to dry here." This echoes what Jonathan Freedland wrote last summer in the Guardian: The "Jewish community have long detected old-fashioned prejudice" in phrases such as "flamboyant north London businessman" regularly used about Levy.

And Rabbi Schochet's comments were echoed in turn by David Rowan, editor of the Jewish Chronicle, who is worried that Levy may be "scapegoated as the traditional outsider-turned-court-Jew whose casting out might finally purge the corrupt body politic." Rowan deplored "the unashamedly anti-Semitic and conspiratorial rhetoric surrounding him." Since anti-Semitism exists, this is not inherently absurd, still less an "insane" accusation, as Stephen Glover of the Daily Mail has called it. But that doesn't make it true either, and the more seriously anti-Semitism is taken, the more cautiously the charge should be used.

As it happens, the Marconi affair gave a good illustration of the real thing. Attempting a succinct account of it is a little like the Monty Python "Summarize Proust" contest, but three ministers in the Liberal government—Rufus Isaacs, the attorney general; David Lloyd George, the chancellor of the exchequer; and Alexander Murray, aka the Master of Elibank, the Liberal chief whip—had bought stock in the American Marconi company. Marconi's British division had just been granted a franchise by the London government, and its shares shot up when the sinking of the Titanic then revealed the new importance of wireless telegraphy, or radio.

When the news of their investment transpired, the three gave, to put it mildly, a disingenuous account of their activities. They were cleared by an inquiry after Elibank had left the government and made himself scarce in South America, sending a message that he couldn't attend the inquiry because of pressing business in Bogotá; Liberal meetings were thereafter disrupted by catcalls of "Bogotá" from Tory hecklers.

Still, that mild derision was nothing compared with the vituperation directed at the attorney general. But then, Isaacs was a Jew. None of the three could be said to come out of it well, but whatever Lloyd George and Murray had done, no one said that their behavior showed what the Welsh were like, or the Scots. Isaacs was venomously denounced as embodying the odious character of "the Jews."

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Geoffrey Wheatcroft's book Yo, Blair! has just been published in Britain.
Photograph of Lord Levy by Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images. Photograph of Tony Blair on Slate's home page by Jeff J. Mitchell/Getty Images.
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