...Then, on top of this, Labour produced a pair of posters poking fun at the Conservatives, one of which showed Howard and the similarly Jewish Conservative Chancellor Oliver Letwin as a pair of pigs with wings. This supposedly illustrated the old English saying "pigs might fly," indicating an unlikely occurrence - such as, ooo, I dunno, a Muslim country voluntarily giving its citizens the vote. This one, in my humble opinion, was simply too childish to give offense - but the second poster, which informed the country that Michael Howard was claiming that he could spend the taxpayers' money not once but twice, and had him waving an old-fashioned fob-watch, like a cross between a sinister hypnotist and someone reflected in the business end of a dessert spoon, had unfortunate Shylock/Fagin connotations.

All became clear when it was revealed that the advertising brain - if that's not an oxymoron - behind the fiasco was none other than Trevor Beatty, the potty-mouthed cretin responsible for the FCUK campaign that has been blighting Blighty for the past decade. It's hard to explain to Israelis - a people known for their "rudeness" - that for 10 years now it's been impossible to walk down a British high street without having the "word" FCUK smack one in the face, this being a supposedly "inspired" anagram for the fashion chain French Connection U.K., but sadly this is so. So it wasn't anti-Semitism - just stupidity, as per.

The adverts have since been withdrawn. But at the moment, the public standing of politicians over here is so low that maybe the issue shouldn't be whether politicians should be worrying about being identified as being British Jews - but rather that British Jews should be worrying about being identified as politicians.