Sorry, Charlotte Church. I'm a fan. But thing is, I'm also Jewish
I’m a big fan of Charlotte Church. Amazing voice, obviously, but also she’s lived through some properly difficult traducing by our vastly exploitative media, and come out the other side admirably, into someone strong and individual and still clearly very talented. And also Welsh, which I like, being half that myself.
Charlotte, however, is not, or is not now, a fan of mine. She wrote a blog recently, in which, after making various references that my online trolls always make about my past career, she accused me of misogyny, indeed of applying a “shush, silly girl” attitude to her — and lumped me together with Nigel Farage.
So first of all, I think she has a point. Because what happened was that on my new podcast with Baroness Warsi, we did not take a recording that she was leading of a Welsh choir singing a musical version of “From The River To The Sea” completely seriously. And I would accept that Church is totally committed to Palestinian activism, and that the choir’s rendition — which was to raise money for an ambulance for Gazan children, a very good cause indeed — was entirely heartfelt.
In which case, I no doubt should not have made any fun of it. Of course, we live in a time when making fun of anything is assumed only to be mockery, which itself is a strange downgrading of laughter as a positive force — in this case, I would argue that I was treating it lightly because I was trying to take the heat out of the rage that surrounds the whole debate around “From The River To The Sea”, but let’s leave that to one side. I accept it could come across as belittling, and so I should expect pushback, which I have received.
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He, more than most, should remember, "Jews Don't Count" as that is the title of the book he wrote. A very good read, I might add.