D.D. Guttenplan | The Nation

Manchester—Is the United Kingdom ready for its first Jewish Prime Minister? The last time Labour held its annual Conference in this northern metropolis the question would have seemed not just parochial but preposterous. I remember watching Former Nation intern Ed Miliband looking distinctly uncomfortable at a Labour Friends of Israel reception just a few days after his come-from-behind 2010 victory as party leader. Despite the kvelling, there was still a palpable reluctance to embrace this newly-anointed Jacob so soon after he’d elbowed aside brother David’s embittered Esau. But then the whole Labour party seemed too consumed by internal anguish to notice that behind the mask of coalition and compromise the Conservatives were pushing forward an aggressive program of cuts and privatization that no one had voted for.

Part of the problem was that during a disastrous election campaign Labour, too, had embraced a version of the austerity narrative that became the coalition government’s founding myth. For months after their defeat Labour remained too obsessed with fiscal rectitude—and fratricidal drama—to offer any real alternatives.

All of which made this year’s Conference seem like Ed Miliband’s coming out party. Although never one to deny his heritage, Miliband is a thoroughly secular Jew. But having decided to use his leader’s speech this year to tell the nation “Who I am. What I believe. And why I have a deep conviction that together we can change this country,” he needed to get up close and personal, outing himself not just as a Jew, but as the son of immigrants—even an unabashed intellectual.

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Does it matter who wins today’s election for mayor of London? To the candidates, certainly. If Labour’s Ken Livingstone loses his bid to return to the office he held from 2000 to 2008, that will probably mean the end of a political career that began in the Greater London Council, where Livingstone proved such a thorn in the side of Margaret Thatcher that she abolished municipal government all across Britain just to get rid of him. When Tony Blair returned self-government to London, Livingstone returned to the political stage, proving just as annoying to Blair.

Livingstone was a brilliant mayor. It wasn’t just getting through the congestion charge (a toll on cars entering central London)—something Mike Bloomberg and all his billions couldn’t manage in Manhattan. Or the successful introduction of the Oyster travelcards. Or his opposition to Blair and his successor Gordon Brown’s idiotic (and ruinously expensive) devotion to Public-Private Partnerships to finance capital projects. Or the brilliant redesign of Trafalgar Square from death-spiral traffic island to one of the world’s great public stages. Or even the truly statesmanlike way he kept the city together in the wake of the July 7, 2005, bomb attacks. Livingstone understood, more than any other British politician, the way cities worked, what they needed to grow and prosper and why people came to live in them—sometimes at great cost and across enormous distances.

London

Does Elizabeth Murdoch know how to make gnocchi? Because this was the week when it became blindingly obvious that whoever was scripting Rupert Murdoch’s moves—personally flying in to London to open a new Sun on Sunday to replace the toxic News of the World; tweeting a defense of his fallen favorite, Rebekah Brooks, when it emerged that in addition to presiding over a paper that paid hundreds of thousands of pounds in bribes to policemen she’d also been loaned a police horse to ride; stripping his son James of his power over News International, the subsidiary that runs the News Corp.’s British newspapers and packing him off to work with Moe Greene in Las Vegas (Surely that should be “with Chase Carey in New York”?—ed.)—the swelling soundtrack had to be by Nino Rota and Ennio Morricone.

We still have a long wait for the box set—and the next installment, Murdoch in America: Judgment Day, won’t be released until prosecutors at the Department of Justice decide whether the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which is designed to prevent the payment of bribes to foreign officials by US corporations in order to gain unfair advantage, applies to what Deputy Assistant Commissioner Sue Akers told the Leveson Inquiry was “the delivery of regular, frequent and sometimes significant sums of money to small numbers of public officials by journalists” in order to gain exclusive access to “salacious gossip” which the Sun, Murdoch’s flagship British tabloid, could then splash all over the front page. Which presumably helped the paper sell more copies than its less-wired competitors.

London

If corporations really were people, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation would be breaking rocks. That’s the take-away from yesterday’s astonishing ruling by Geoffrey Vos, the judge presiding over the phone-hacking civil trial here. In agreeing to settle with thirty-seven victims yesterday the company clearly hoped to be able to draw a line under the scandal, which has already seen the closure of the world’s best-selling English language tabloid, The News of the World, and both Rupert Murdoch and his son James forced to give evidence before a Parliamentary select committee. With the trial scheduled to begin on February 13, the Murdochs must have hoped that if they could make the case go away by paying off the plaintiffs then the steady drip of information about News Corp.’s criminal activities—which include phone hacking, payments to police and breaking into e-mail accounts—might stop before it lead higher up the corporate chain of command.

The company’s first problem is that the thirty-seven victims who agreed to settle include many of the most famous boldface names—actor Jude Law, who had his phone messages hacked and was himself the target of physical surveillance by Murdoch’s men for a period of years received £130,000 (over $200,000); his ex-wife Sadie Frost got £50,000 (over $77,000); last May Law’s ex-girlfriend, Sienna Miller, was paid £100,000 (over $150,000) to settle her claim—it didn’t include all of them. Singer Charlotte Church, for example has yet to settle. So far just over half of those victims who have actually filed suit have agreed to settle. And there are literally hundreds of additional victims whose names have not yet been made public.