21 June 2006 – The Times – By Michael Grove 
Ignorance, it seems, is a defence in the eyes of the law. Well, it is if you’re Ken Livingstone.
The Mayor of London has been cleared of anti-Semitism after having told the businessmen
David and Simon Reuben to “go back to Iran and try their luck with the ayatollahs” because,
according to the council officer who investigated his remarks, he could not have known that
the Reuben brothers were Jewish.
Absolutely. How can the man responsible for the busy task of running multicultural London be
expected to know that a name like Reuben might suggest a particular faith or ethnicity? These
PC zealots will be expecting poor Ken to know the difference between a mosque and a
temple next. The mayor was just unlucky in his choice of words — as he has been before.
It was, obviously, just a coincidence that Ken suggested to two Jewish brothers that they be
sent to a country run by a Holocaust denier. Just as it was pure bad luck that Ken found
himself comparing a Jewish reporter to a concentration camp guard. It must also have been a
simple slip of the tongue when Ken argued that global capitalism killed more people than
Hitler. He could not possibly have been aware how often global capitalism, like rootless
cosmopolitanism, has been deployed as a metaphor for conspiratorial Jewish influence. And
nor could Ken have been expected to know, when he invited the Muslim Brotherhood leader,
Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, to City Hall, that the Sheikh supported suicide attacks on Israel.
Surely only radicals carried away with crazy notions like institutional racism or unwitting
prejudice could possibly detect anything worrying in these stray words and acts? And surely
the Ken Livingstone we have grown to know and love would never have any time for that sort
of nonsense now, would he?
The writer is Conservative MP for Surrey Heath