Lobby Fodder

Peter Oborne, excoriating scourge of the Political Class and true conservative opponent of its wars, will use tomorrow evening's Dispatches to break one of Britain's great political taboos, namely that against mentioning the existence of our very own Israel Lobby. It will be interesting to see how far Channel Four will let him go.

Just in case, the Israel Lobby accounts for the overwhelming majority of newspapers sold in this country, terrifies the life out of the broadcast media with its screaming about anti-Semitism if anything other than its own view is ever presented, provided from the criminal sale of seats in the legislature much of the money necessary to create New Labour (can you imagine that someone like James Purnell, who used to chair Labour Friends of Israel, would ever have become a Cabinet Minister under normal circumstances?), dominates Cameron's Tories, and remains much stronger in the Lib Dems than is often assumed.

Most significantly of all, it embodies, just as it does in America, a secular Ashkenazi nationalist position which is not held by most Israelis, fewer and fewer of whom fall into all three of those categories.

How far are we paying for it? Oborne may be able to tell us. I very much hope that he is and does. But we know that the American taxpayer is ultimately footing the bill for the maintenance on his soil of, in such forms as AIPAC and the ADL, the largest spy network maintained by any country on the soil of any other, to which Presidential candidates are even expected to go and pay court.

Will Obama bother to turn up in 2012? What would happen if he didn't? The Christian Zionists (by no means all of the white Evangelicals, quite a number of whom voted for him anyway) would never vote for him, no matter what, so he wouldn't be losing anything there. And the Jews, many of whom in any case do not agree with the Mossad position, mostly live in safely blue states.

At their respective heights, the British Empire and the Soviet Union ran large and powerful spy networks in the United States. But they were real powers. And, courtly as Britons and Russians can both be, they certainly did not have the sheer effrontery to charge the Americans for the privilege of hosting those networks. Oh, the shame, the shame!