- The Observer,
- Sunday December 2 2007
It was not that their warm handclasp and beaming smiles at last April's lunch at the Banqueting Hall in Westminster were surprising. Quite the opposite. The event was a reminder not only of Brown's and Mendelsohn's shared history, but of a remarkably active Labour lobbying group that not only brought them together but had earlier pitted Mendelsohn, far less happily, with the third major figure in this funding crisis, David Abrahams.
The group is called Labour Friends of Israel. Founded in 1957, it has grown in the past half-century into probably the party's most successful parliamentary lobby group. At the party conference, other groups vie to lure delegates to fringe meetings, with the occasional promise of a cabinet minister. But the LFI's evening reception has seldom bothered to list its speaker in the conference handbook; it has gone without saying that its ministerial draw would be the MP for Sedgefield, Tony Blair - a mantle that at this year's conference seamlessly passed to the member for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath, Gordon Brown. At April's lunch, where Brown was keynote speaker, Mendelsohn was ending a five-year stint as head of the organisation.
LFI does much what it says on the tin. Backed by some of the most influential members of the Jewish community - as is its Tory twin, the CFI - the group works to promote a broad sympathy for Israel in the Middle East. It is a concern that has deepened for Britain's 300,000 Jews as the collapse of peace efforts and rising Arab-Israeli conflict have led to a surge of anti-semitic incidents.
But despite the rush of online conspiracy theorists to suggest some grand nexus of LFI funding and influence in Labour's latest crisis, the group does not explicitly push for foreign policy commitments. LFI has long backed a two-state peace deal. Its members are sometimes critical of Israeli government policy. It doesn't fund politicians, but focuses on taking MPs to the Middle East and setting up meetings with Israeli government and opposition figures. Blair, then Labour's home affairs spokesman, went on such a visit in the Nineties.
And while leading Labour fundraisers or donors - such as Lord Levy, Brown's venture capital friend Sir Ronald Cohen and David Abrahams - have been active in LFI or its events, so are other figures with little or no wider interest in the party.
Still, with Blair and Brown as decades-old LFI members, the group hasan astonishingly successful record of picking parliamentary chairmen who have gone on to ministerial office. Kim Howells, the Middle East minister who was publicly critical of Israel's Lebanon incursion last year, was LFI chairman in the early Nineties. More recent chairmen have included current ministers James Purnell and Jim Murphy.
LFI has also managed to bridge the Blair-Brown divide, with one brief moment of crisis - in the wake of the move by Brownite MPs on the eve of last year's Labour conference to force Blair out of office. One of the signatories of the crucial anti-Blair letter was Brown ally Ian Wright. He was, at the time, chairman of LFI.
With Blair due to be guest of honour at the LFI reception, Mendelsohn persuaded Wright to step aside for 'constituency' reasons so that Jane Kennedy could take temporary charge of the group and introduce the Prime Minister.
