Howard Jacobson's Blog, page 16

Apologise or leave the party, Nick Clegg demanded, so the lady left the party. Tough place, politics. The lady in question, if you haven't been following, is Baroness Tonge, and the offence for which she would not apologise was telling Israel it would "reap what it had sown" and cease to exist. So somewhere between a promise and a threat, another example of the Baroness's style of fulminatory rabble-rousing, an apparent exhalation of longing for Israel's extinction. Can a wish be genocidal? In Baroness Tonge's case, yes. If wishes were horses, bigots would ride.

This being London Fashion Week, unless last week was London Fashion Week, we attend with respect to the words of Vivienne Westwood.

The subject of this week's dissertation is the banality of beauty once it is harnessed to the needs of commerce. Or, put another way, David Beckham's dick.

In total agreement with Terence Blacker's remarks earlier this week in these pages about "a new fear of seriousness" in our culture leading to an overabundance of feeble, inappropriate and half-hearted "humour".

I read that a public service television channel in Turkey has marked Holocaust Day by showing Claude Lanzmann's great documentary Shoah. Apparently this is the first time Lanzmann's film, or indeed anything like it, has been shown on a public station in a Muslim country. Muslim audiences are more accustomed to programmes – such as dramatisations of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion – which show Jews as the initiators of evil rather than its victims.

Regarding the iconography of the Page 3 girl, I am – just in case there was ever any doubt about it – entirely of the party of those who find such sexual objectification demeaning. And not only to women. It demeans men to suppose that's what they want to look at. And the truth is – no matter that this is to give away a closely guarded secret – they don't.

Here's a story I've just read online courtesy of The Wall Street Journal. I think it's funny – funny in the telling – others might not. You'll see why there are likely to be differences of opinion about the story when I say it concerns the spray-painting of swastikas in a Brooklyn neighbourhood.

OK. This is the week in which we get a few things straight. Regarding Diane Abbott. She who lives by the tweet shall die by the tweet. As for saying sorry, the word is now discredited. And as for the imputed racism... well, speaking for ourselves, we have been called far worse names than Diane Abbott called us.

There's a scene in Pride and Prejudice in which the imperious Lady Catherine de Bourgh expresses amazement that Elizabeth Bennet grew up without a governess. "Then who taught you?" she wants to know. "We were always encouraged to read," Elizabeth answers, "and had all the masters that were necessary."

For the Chinese, 2011 was the Year of Rabbit.