Sketch: Ken Livingstone and a love affair with the H-word

It took the former Mayor of London just 1.8 seconds to mention Hitler as he appeared before a Home Affairs Select Committee who are producing a report into anti-Semitism

The former London Mayor speaking to the Home Affairs Select Committee

For the purposes of a juvenile joke, I started a stopwatch when Ken Livingstone began to speak, with the intention of stopping it when he first said the word ‘Hitler.’

It stopped on 1.8 seconds. Seven words were all it took.

Had I a second stopwatch, I might have started it with the intention of stopping it when Ken Livingstone finally apologised for his suggestion Hitler was a Zionist, you won’t be shocked to learn it would still be running now.

He was before the Home Affairs Select Committee, who are producing a report into anti-Semitism, chiefly in response to Ken’s own suspension from the Labour Party for bringing it into disrepute.

To say he sounded like a stuck record would be to pay him a compliment. A stuck record stops on a piece of music you must at some point have found enjoyable. Listening to a whiningly nasal pleurodeline narcissist saying the name of the Leader of the Third Reich over and over again is significantly more distressing than any acoustic malfunction resulting from a rogue Dandelion and Burdock spilt over the turntable.

If you can recall the scene in 1999 Spike Jonze cult movie Being John Malkovich, in which the actor John Malkovich enters a secret portal behind a filing cabinet and is supplanted into a world in which the only word anyone can say is Malkovich, you might be able to imagine the life of Ken Livingstone in the month and half since he appeared on the Vanessa Feltz Show and – entirely unprompted – began an explanation of Hitler’s policy towards Germany’s Jews in 1932.

There has, since then, not been any a TV or radio station, YouTube channel, Google Hangout or string-linked pair of plastic cups in all the land that has not at some point emitted the sound of Mr Livingstone saying the word Hitler at least three times a second while gallantly refusing to apologise for "telling the truth" that absolutely nobody ever asked him to tell.

“Did he have anything he wanted to say to the committee at the beginning?” Committee chair Keith Vaz asked him, still wearing his Leicester City scarf.

“Well if I had said that Hitler was a Zionist I would apologise for that but I didn’t,” Ken told them.

Which is partly true. He merely said that, “Hitler was supporting Zionism.”

The SNP’s Stuart McDonald, who in the interest of clarity is the Stuart McDonald of the SNPs three Stuart McDonalds, and is not Stewart MacDonald or Stewart McDonald, made the gentle point that Hitler’s policy - the forced repatriation of Jews from their home in order to remove their assets is not quite the same as the Return to the Promise Land stuff of twenty first century Zionism, to which Ken replied, ‘You’ll have to speak up I’ve left my hearing aid at home.’ One would have thought he might have brought it with him. Either way, he never gave an answer.

The cross that must be borne by those who speak up for Hitler in his pro-Zionist early phase is a heavy one, but it is not borne alone.

“I cannot walk down the street without people stopping me and saying ‘We know what you said is true. Don’t give in,” he said.

We can only assume these are the same people who ‘constantly’ tell Donald Trump he ‘has the most beautiful hands,’ though an extensive investigation by several leading US newspapers has been unable to unearth any of them.

With nine days to go until the UK becomes arguably the first in history to voluntarily send itself into recession, it’s arguable it's at best a waste of resources that one of its best known faces was sitting in Parliament quoting from "a speech Hitler gave on the 6th July 1920 in which he said that Jews belong to Palestine".

But it wasn’t he that had caused offence. “What caused offence was an embittered old group of Blairite MPs running around stirring up trouble,” he said, at which Chuka Umunna struggled to contain a laugh. “It’s no use you wriggling away Mr Umunna,” he was told.

What followed was a speedy runthrough Ken’s 'Anti-Semitic' Greatest Hits. Yes, he’d compared a Jewish reporter to a Nazi concentration camp guard. He "didn’t know he was Jewish.” Yes, he’d told the property developer Ruben Brothers to “go back to where they came from.”

But he didn’t know Mr Ruben and Mr Ruben were Jewish. “I’ve been an atheist since I was twelve,” he said.

“If you want a confession, often in my life I’ve been rude to people. They’ve deserved it.”

The Conservative and Muslim MP Nusrat Ghani suggested he mentioned the war, and compared people to Hitler, rather more often than most.

“I was born in 1945,” he said. “There is a spot opposite my house where a German V2 bomb fell.”

Asked the straightforward question as to whether he was anti-Semitic himself, his answer began with the word, "Well".

It lasted an hour. It ended with Mr Livingstone saying: "I’ve enjoyed it".

The truth, as far as those who know him better can tell, is that he’s not anti-Semitic. It’s just what he has to do to get out the house. He could just apologise, of course, but then the phone would stop ringing, and the stopwatches would never start.