As London-based media people we are perhaps more interested than most in the spat between Ken Livingstone and the Evening Standard, the city's evening newspaper. But when the mayor who, after all, has a bigger personal mandate than the prime minister, tells a press conference that the great-grandfather of the present proprietor "would have been at the front of the queue of collaborators" if the Nazis had invaded, you really have to take notice.
The Standard has changed hands and slants over the years (a previous editor was Michael Foot, the former Labour leader) but it is Associated Newspapers, its present owners and the owners of the Daily Mail, that are the real target of Mr Livingstone's ire. He branded their titles "as some of the most reprehensibly managed, edited and owned newspapers in the world."
Wikipedia has a good entry on the flagship title taking in the 1st Viscount Rothermere's support for the British fascist leader Oswald Mosely ("Hurrah for the Blackshirts" read one of his articles) and his meetings with Adolf Hitler. He argued for peace with the man he addressed as "My Dear Fuhrer" up until the 1939 invasion of Prague, when he then urged the government to prepare for war.
The ideologies of the 1930s are pertinent to this phase of the row (a long running saga that has also involved the congestion charge) since it began when Mr Livingstone asked a Standard journalist if he had been a "German war criminal". When the journalist told him he found that offensive because he was Jewish, Mr Livingstone likened him to a concentration camp guard. He has refused to apologise, insisting that reporters make the same choices in life as everyone else and it is "an abdication of moral responsibility" for one to claim that he or she is only doing their job.
Continuing his anti-Associated tirade with details of how the Mail's "first campaign was against Jewish refugees coming to London from the pogroms" and it fought proposals in the 1930s "that Jewish refugees fleeing Hitler should be admitted to this country" it is clear that the mayor is trying to widen out the row. He may also have rather cleverly turned the focus of the story from allegations of anti-semitism against him to allegations of persistent discrimination against minorities from 19th century Jews to today's asylum seekers on the part of the Mail.
It will be interesting to see how the paper covers it.
