Exclusive: Lord Levy Writes For TJ

by Michael Levy - Thursday 15th May 2008


The first thing I did after finally deciding to write the political memoir which has been igniting such controversy in recent days was to embark on a pilgrimage of sorts – to the crowded rectangle of streets where Hackney meets Stoke Newington and Clapton in the east of London.

I began at Number 48 Alvington Crescent. It was there that I shared a tiny, one-room flat with my parents for the first eight years of my life. But the other places I revisited in the surrounding streets – the old Ridley Road market, and the former sites of Shacklewell Lane synagogue, the Bnei Akiva bayit on Cazenove Road, the Hackney Downs grammar school, or the Clapton Club on Lea Bridge Road – were a powerful reminder to me that however ‘poor’ we were in creature comforts, I enjoyed an upbringing that was extraordinarily rich in every other way.

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There was a luxury of spirit, faith, family, community and tradition that has coloured everything which I have achieved or accomplished since.

Much of the huge media interest in my book – and Downing Street’s obvious discomfort over it – has focused on the so-called ‘TB-GB’s’, my exposure of previously unknown details about the relationship between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown and of life at the centre of New Labour.

There has also been much interest, as I had of course hoped, in my account of the terrible and at times terrifying months at the centre of a ‘cash for peerages’ investigation in which political point-scoring seemed sometimes to make the simple facts or issues of right and wrong an afterthought.

There were times when I felt trapped in an almost Kafkaesque drama. I knew of course that I had never done any of the things that were being alleged, and that I had certainly never traded ‘cash for honours’. But amid a tide of leaks and innuendo, with the police apparently apparently intent on painting a picture of ‘crime’ and ‘conspiracy’ where none existed, I sometimes feared that the truth had ceased to matter.

In the end, I think that what gave me faith that I would be exonerated – as well as the ability to carry on – was the strength which I still took from the bedrock of support, belief and values I had gained decades earlier during my east London childhood.

In fact, one of the most surprising and powerful effects of working on a book which I had never expected to write was that it required me to revisit every period and aspect of my life.

Sometimes, this was enormously painful. The most obviously example is that I literally had to relive the darkest hours of the ‘cash for peerages’ investigation in order to describe them honestly and accurately.

But there were other less recent wounds re-opened as well, such as the agony of sitting by my dear mother Annie’s hospital bedside during her final weeks.
While most of the national media interest has predictably revolved around my close political and personal relationship with Tony Blair and the ‘cash for peerages’ crisis, that part of my book – like that part of my life – simply can’t be understood without also grasping the central importance of a childhood steeped in family, youth club, Hebrew classes, synagogue life, community.

Physically most of the landmarks have gone, or changed, in the years since I left in my early twenties. The one, to me hugely gratifying, exception is the shul on Walford Road. For years, my late father was the shammas there, and it played a central role in his and my life.

But as I note in describing the former site of Lea Bridge Road synagogue – where I went to youth club and led the children’s services and first met my wife, Gilda – even though all that remains of the original building is a ‘rectangle of red bricks’ in a vacant dirt lot, they are a ‘reminder of the deeply etched set of shared experiences, and shared values, without which I doubt either of us could have survived’ the trauma of my final 18 months at Tony Blair’s side.

Similarly, it was my conscious decision to rethink my life after the shock of my mother’s death – trading the glitter of the music industry for a greater focus on community and charity, especially through Jewish Care – which made my life in politics, with all its ups and downs, possible.

One friend who has already read the book reacted by saying he was happy to find it was not only about politics, fascinating though he had found those parts, but that it was ‘Jewish, too.’

Exactly like the life I have set out in its pages to recall, and record and recount.


- ‘A Question of Honour’ by Lord Levy is published by Simon & Schuster (£18.99)

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