A ‘gold standard’ one day, the return of Diane Abbott the next

“Told you so” is never a good place to start an argument. It is, however, an excellent place to end one and this week, many British Jews have earned the right to finish it.

News that Diane Abbott MP has been readmitted to the Labour Party is one such moment. It arrives courtesy of Prime Minister Andy Burnham, who marked his first fortnight in Downing Street with a moving visit to Jewish Care in Golders Green, praising it as the “gold standard” of British social care — and then, roughly five minutes later, restored the whip to an MP suspended for insisting that Jewish people don’t really experience racism “all their lives.”

Cynics might call the timing careless. The rest of us might call it a tell.

Antisemitism is often described as a cancer. It’s an apt analogy, so let’s run with it: a tumour can be cut out, but recovery demands years of chemotherapy, vigilance, and the grim knowledge that remission is never the same as cure.

Too many in our communal leadership, dazzled by the diagnosis being read out loud, skipped straight to the discharge papers. They accepted the gongs. They mistook access for influence. As the Psalmist warned in Chapter 146: “Put not your trust in princes“. Sound advice, and evidently one line of Tehillim our leadership skimmed past on the way to the honours list.

Being clever after the event is a cheap trick. I’d like to think I can’t be accused of it, because none of this was hidden. Sir Keir Starmer’s manifesto explicitly committed Labour to recognising a Palestinian state.

As Prime Minister, he then restored funding to UNRWA, suspended arms export licences to Israel, and upheld the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant — hardly a hidden agenda, more a checklist ticked off in daylight.

And yet, throughout, communal leaders kept turning up to the parties, kept the invitations flowing the other way, and kept insisting, with the fervour of the recently converted, that “we have never had friends like this.”

Enter Andy Burnham: a man who could tour a Jewish care home on a Wednesday, call it the gold standard, and by Thursday evening have reopened the door to a colleague suspended twice over for minimising Jewish suffering

One assumes he’s still laughing all the way to the bank — or, appropriately enough now he’s out of a job, the food bank.

Because here is the punchline nobody wanted: it wasn’t only Starmer. Jewish communal leaders lavished one Corbyn loyalist — hugged him, honoured him, handed him a kiddush cup, apparently on the theory that a Jewish father-in-law counts as collateral — and when he departed, they simply transferred their faith to the next one.

Enter Andy Burnham: a man who could tour a Jewish care home on a Wednesday, call it the gold standard, and by Thursday evening have reopened the door to a colleague suspended twice over for minimising Jewish suffering. If Starmer’s Labour was chemotherapy that didn’t quite finish the course, Burnham’s has just skipped the follow-up appointment entirely and gone straight back to the buffet.

There is an old Yiddish saying: Der mentsh trakht, un Got lakht — man plans and God laughs. Somewhere, He must be in stitches. Meanwhile the rest of us, who never doubted for a moment how this would end, are left with the singularly Jewish achievement of being right and miserable about it simultaneously.

Saying, “I told you so” has rarely hurt so much. But it has never, in living memory, felt quite so inevitable.