When The Levy Broke

Regular readers will know only too well that I've never been totally comfortable with the role of Michael 'Abe' Levy in the Labour Party. I've worried about his sex life, I've had nightmares about him and I've agonised about his gongs. I've even imagined him incarcerated in a small safe.

When Lord Cashpoint published his memoirs last month, like most people I got a nasty case of the 'TB-GBs'. I didn't much care for Abe's revelation that Tony thought Gordon was a liar, a hopeless leader and incapable of defeating Macaroon. Nor did I like his assertions that Gordon knew all about the cash for honours business and the secret loans, despite the PM having denied this strenuously, outside and inside the House. But most of all I was unhappy about Levy's references to Carole Caplin's "increasingly long massages" of Tony Blair. Now that's just unnecessary, malicious sexual tittle-tattle.

So I was delighted to read Abe's wonderful piece in Totally Jewish this morning. It describes so eloquently and poignantly how Abe recently embarked on a pilgrimage to revisit his roots - down the now unrecognisable Ridley Road, past the now-defunct Shacklewell Lane synagogue, along by the long since failed and demolished Hackney Downs School and up Murder Mile to the Lea Bridge Road. As Abe says in his interview, these locations "were a powerful reminder to me that however 'poor' most people in Hackney were - and no matter how much worse life became for many of them - I enjoyed a privileged upbringing and eventually became extraordinarily rich."

Ah, how touching. I was really moved. Linda cried when I read it out loud. "Why can't you make serious gelt, like Abe?", she wept.