Why I'm Sort of Slightly Sympathetic Towards Emily Thornberry

I have no reason to love Emily Thornberry, a Labour blowhard whose explosion of phoney outrage I once had to wipe away and then denounce during a BBC Question Time appearance in Stockton-on-Tees, when we were on the same panel.

Perhaps that���s why I stood by when Ms Thornberry, whose interesting background is worth studying, was oddly pilloried for a not especially outrageous tweet during the Rochester and Strood by-election.

 

I could never see that this really deserved the level of criticism it received. It appeared to reflect an attitude which I would have thought was shared by most of the people who then attacked her. The fury of the left-wing elite towards Corbynistas is a very odd thing. I���m fascinated by the ���anti-Semitism��� charge against the Corbynites, which certainly has some justification, given their sympathy for anti-Israel factions. But those who make this charge have in many cases for years swallowed and repeated anti-Israel propaganda which I have always regarded as being selective criticism founded in an unacknowledged Judophobia. Put it like this. I've never been able to find another explanation for their special concentration on the undoubted faults of Israel, and their lack of interest in the parallel faults of other countries.

 

 

But now she���s been caught out not knowing the name of the French Foreign Minister, I feel I must speak up for her. I do not know the name of the French Foreign Minister, even though I read it this morning. It  just hasn���t stuck. I���d have to look it up, or write it on my sleeve if I were, by some sort of nightmare chance, Shadow Foreign Secretary.  And no wonder. I will be unlikely to need it.  Once, I would have  done (especially when it was the gloriously named Maurice Couve de Murville, whose comings and goings were incessant in the 1960s) . And for ages I could also confidently have identified the German Foreign Minister, Hans-Dieter Genscher.

Long ago now,  I tried to maintain a pretty close interest in the politics of the main continental countries, closely studying the relevant pages of the FT and The Times. I thought this was the sort of thing an informed person ought to know. When I visited France I could usually pick up the thread of French politics by reading Le Monde,  but it���s all gone now.  The end of the Cold War, and the death of truly independent countries caused by the EU, has made foreign governments as interesting as district councils in faraway bits of the West Midlands.

There was a time in the mid-60s when I could confidently have identified every British MP by his or her constituency, especially enjoying the fact that Frank Hooley was MP for Heeley, then a division of Sheffield.  Now I stare blankly at pictures of the Cabinet, wondering who they are and not feeling much more informed when people give me their names. (���Who? Who?��� I ask, echoing the Duke of Wellington���s querulous, bellowed response to Lord Derby���s 1852 Cabinet of unknowns).  For years I struggled to remember that George Osborne was the name of the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Something in my mind wanted to reject this information. It still does.

So Ms Thornberry seems to me to have a point when she complains that she���s being singled out when she���s asked to name the French Foreign Minister on live TV. Yes, I know she is actually planning to meet the nameless Frenchman. But I���m sure she���d have got it right in time for the meeting. And, despite considering myself well-informed, I can easily imagine being caught out on such a thing. Also, like her in her Shadow Defence Secretary period , I didn���t know what a Defcon was, though I could identify a CEP, know roughly what Tritium is ( and where you might just encounter it) , can  tell a SLCM from an SLBM, know the difference between a warship and a battleship and can distinguish an air-superiority fighter from a strike aircraft and a tank from a self-propelled gun.

And I have to ask, did her interrogator know who the French Foreign Minister was, much before he asked the question? And how would he do on a quickfire quiz on leading continentalolitci9ians or, come to that, the names of Barack Obama���s Cabinet? More important what do most political journalists really know about history, foreign affairs or anything much?  All they need to know is the line of the day, who���s in and who���s out - and they���re safe.

This sort of failing isn���t quite the same as not knowing the price of a loaf or a pint of milk or a stamp. Such things (which politicians now rehearse frenziedly at election times) are tests of whether you have entirely lost touch with the world of normal people. I���m glad they feel they ought to know. Though they don���t mean much if you don���t also know what the average household���s take-home pay and average debts are, what it costs to rent a house or flat in the South-East, or the outrageous price of a two-mile bus ride.

And so, Emily Thornberry, you sort of have some of my sympathy today.