On Sunday night, I went to the local synagogue to listen to a talk by Louise Ellman, the Labour MP for Liverpool Riverside. This was surprising on several levels. I hadn’t set foot inside a synagogue for over 30 years (apart from weddings and bar mitzvahs) and had even gone as far as marrying a non-Jew. Also, before the past couple of weeks, I had no interest whatsoever in seeing a politician, of any stripe, speak.
A few minutes into Ellman’s speech, I was horrified to hear of the abuse that had been meted out to this charismatic, grandmotherly politician by members of her own party. ‘She has no human blood,’ some delightful individual had written on social media. Mrs Ellman, 73, made a Dame in last year’s Queen’s Birthday Honours, was called ‘a racist child abuser’ and a ‘Jewish Labour movement bitch’.
But then, maybe I wasn’t entirely surprised. Because the weekend before, I had been involved in a (minor) Twitterstorm of my own.
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